frame candidate goes to: this-edition V villager
A company sits in the two moves on the map: a guess becoming a product, and a product becoming a commodity
Who reads the code depends on where it is on the map: explorer code is read for intent, mostly by agents; villager code is read line by line, because this is where changes land and the blast radius lives; town planner code is read by deterministic checks at the boundary, with a person for the exceptions. The company sits in the two moves between them: from explorer to villager, when a guess becomes a product and needs the review it never had; from villager to town planner, when a product becomes a commodity and the review becomes checks that run without anyone. The trap on both sides is not knowing which stage the code is at: teams find a model's mistakes too risky and swing to reviewing everything by hand.
Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).
Note. Quote, word for word, from the March 2026 article the newsroom cites: 'Before AI agents started writing code, you could argue that 90% of the code running in production was not being read by anyone.' The SaaS article's version: businesses that take the finished brief and run it, paid by consumption and by the fact that it keeps working, not by the seat; and 'more engineers, not fewer'. Extends the-handover from a frame about prototypes to a frame about where a company's value is.
Where it comes from
- If somebody built a company on code review Who reads the code; The company (newsroom)
- The SaaS apocalypse will be decided by inertia, not by AI The mistake, and where the money actually is: village and town-planner companies (newsroom)
What it answers in the 2018 book
- Are you a pionner, Settlers or Town Planners answered outline, Life Patterns
- Be a founder answered written, Life Patterns
Where it goes
Chapter Be a founder: the expert founders, part Start the company (drafting); topic Explorers, villagers and town planners (Wardley's frame).
Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Be a founder: the expert can build first now, and the test is whether they miss it, There is a company in this: a code review that reads every layer, for somebody to build, The expert founders, in numbers: 45 is the mean age, experience doubles the odds, a third of US startups have one founder, The SaaS apocalypse will be decided by inertia, not by AI, because AI is available to both sides, Users were never happy: 91% frustrated, 80% of features rarely or never used, $21 million a year in idle licences, What SaaS refused to build to protect its moat is exactly what a customer's agent needs.
Node idea:the-company-sits-in-the-two-moves in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.