Pipe and Verse, What?

The demo used to end with applause.

Early in my product career, you could feel the room shift when you showed someone a new capability. Instant payments that eliminated the three-day wait. Transparent pricing that finally gave buyers the same information as sellers. A portal that connected people to services they didn't know existed. The reaction was always the same: When can we have this?

People leaned forward. They saw themselves in the solution. A business development officer spending less time on paperwork, more time with clients. A small business owner finally understanding what they'd pay before signing. Someone in a rural town accessing basic financial services previously locked behind geography and cost.

The technology was doing for them. Automating the tedious. Illuminating the hidden. Unlocking the stuck.

Then the work changed.

Over the past twelve months, I've watched the demos get quieter. Same conference rooms. Similar problems being solved. But now when someone shows how AI can analyze a contract, write a code, design a system—the people who used to be first adopters sit back in their chairs.

Some are excited, others, not. You can feel the heavy air in the room, virtual or not.

The question isn't when can we have this? anymore. It's what happens to me?

The technology isn't doing for them now. It's doing instead of them. And they know it (or at least, that’s how they’re made to feel).

The Tension That Builds Everything

Ada Lovelace saw it first. In 1843, while the men around her obsessed over Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine as a glorified calculator, she wrote that the machine could compose music, produce graphics, serve science in ways "poetical." She didn't mean flowery. She meant the engine could express relationships, create beauty, touch the sublime—if anyone cared enough to program it that way.

Mathematics, she understood, wasn't just logic. It was creative. Rigorous and imaginative.

A century and a half later, Stanford professor James March made the same argument about organizations. He called it "plumbing and poetry." Companies need reliable systems—the pipes that deliver water when you turn the tap. But they also need poetry: purpose, identity, meaning. The reason anyone bothers turning the tap at all.

March watched smart organizations choose between the two. Romantic startups burned through cash chasing vision without building anything that worked. Efficient corporations optimized themselves into irrelevance, technically perfect but spiritually dead.

The best didn't choose. They held both.

Standing on Strong Ground

Brené Brown made it explicit in her 2025 book Strong Ground. She quoted March directly, placed him alongside Carl Jung and Jim Collins, and argued that paradoxical thinking, holding contradictions without collapsing them, is the core leadership competency for our moment.

You need stability and agility. Connection and accountability. Systems that work and meaning that matters.

Brown calls it finding your strong ground. That athletic stance where you're rooted enough to absorb impact but ready enough to move. Not rigid. Not untethered. Both.

In product work, especially now, this tension is everything.

Why Pipe and Verse

I named this site for the thing that's become impossible to ignore: building products in the age of AI requires being fluent in two languages most people think are opposites.

Pipe is the craft. The system design. The model selection. The prompt/context engineering. The careful consideration of edge cases when you're testing an agent that needs to handle real customer. The discipline of making things that actually function when someone's livelihood depends on them working.

Verse is the human element. The empathy to understand why someone who's done client outreach for fifteen years feels existential dread when you automate it. The wisdom to know that "more efficient" isn't always better if it severs the connection that made the work meaningful. The courage to ask whether we should build something just because we can.

Great products aren't pipe or verse. They're the refusal to choose.

Stripe's payment APIs are pipe. The confidence a first-time founder feels seeing their first successful charge: verse. GitHub Copilot's code generation is pipe. The question of what it means to be a developer when the machine writes half your code: verse. ChatGPT's language model is extraordinary pipe. The way it's changing how people think, work, and see themselves: that's verse we're still figuring out.

You can't ignore either. Powerful automation without human consideration creates tools that work perfectly while breaking everything that matters. Empathy without technical rigor means well-intentioned vaporware that helps no one.

What Lives Here

This site is where I think out loud about that intersection.

Some posts will be tactical: how to design AI features that augment rather than replace, when to ship autonomous capabilities versus assistive ones, what product discovery looks like when the technology moves faster than user research. Pipe work. The mechanics of building things responsibly.

Others will be reflective: what happens to professional identity when machines do your job, how to lead teams through technological disruption, what craft means when the craft itself is being automated. Verse. The human questions underneath the capability questions.

Most will be both. Because in practice, they're inseparable.

The shift from automation to autonomy isn't just technical. It's a question about human flourishing. Every product decision now carries weight it didn't before. Do we build AI that frees the loan officer from drudgery so she can spend an hour listening to the anxious couple buying their first home? Can we give the analyst back his evenings so he’s there for his kid's football practice? The goal isn't efficiency for its own sake… it's giving people more capacity for the parts of life and work that matter. The connection. The creativity. The Tuesday morning coffee with a colleague. The things we still can't automate and shouldn't want to.

The Courage to Pursue Both

There's pressure to pick a side.

The technologists want you to move fast and ship capabilities. The humanists want you to slow down and consider consequences. The executives want the cost savings. The employees want their jobs. The market wants transformation. Your users want reassurance.

Choosing one is easier. Holding both is the work.

Lovelace did it in an era when women weren't supposed to do mathematics at all, let alone imagine its artistic possibilities. March did it while most business schools taught that feelings were inefficiency. Brown does it now, as bluster and cruelty get rebranded as strength.

This site is a bet that the tension is worth it. That product craft in the AI age means staying in the difficult middle ground where capability meets consequence. Where the pipes deliver something worth receiving. Where the verse asks whether we're building the future people actually want to live in.

I'm still figuring it out. These are field notes from the attempt.

Welcome to Pipe and Verse.