A must-read from Julie Belião at Mozilla.ai: "When shipping becomes too easy."
There is something deeply counterintuitive in the idea that the disappearance of friction in software engineering can itself become a trap.
At Michelin—and I'll own the bias—we've long known that not all friction is waste. Some of it is precisely what keeps the tyre in contact with the road. What makes steering possible in the first place. A tyre that no longer grips means a car that no longer listens to the driver. And it's the user—the road—that ultimately imposes the turn. Teams don't choose the trajectory. They anticipate it, or they take the ditch.
Collapsing the friction of software delivery means gaining speed while progressively losing that contact. And when the road curves, you often discover it too late.
"As AI progressively collapses the cost of building [...] the real scarcity may shift from execution to judgment."
What the article captures particularly well is that friction in the digital delivery cycle is not only a resource constraint. It is also what creates the time for conversations with users to happen, for design intuition to mature, for architecture to resist overengineering, for teams to discover that some things should not be built at all. Things you cannot infinitely compress without losing something essential.
As Julie reminds us, "dogfooding"—forcing ourselves to actually use the tools we build for others—feels like an increasingly healthy discipline in these times of overdelivery. I try to apply this principle as much as possible within my teams, as we progressively engage in the re-engineering of several internal digital building blocks.
"Use what you ship. Not as a ritual, but as an operating constraint."
In a world where software becomes nearly frictionless to generate, this may become one of the last healthy forms of gravity.
Finally, beside the article itself, I love the choice of Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. In this painting, the falling Icarus is almost invisible. The system keeps operating normally around the collapse.
A powerful metaphor for our emerging age of generative abundance: the danger may not always be spectacular failure, but gradual disconnection—between products, teams, and the people they are meant to serve.
Meanwhile, the ships continue sailing, the farmer keeps working, the shepherd keeps watching over his flock. Almost as if the painting were also reminding us of the value of work unfolding over time—cultivation, patience, the gradual growth of teams—and not only the fascination for premature scaling.
