O'Reilly

Your Next Product Is a Process: Harper Reed Live with Tim O’Reilly

Harper Reed has spent his career building software people actually love working on, from cofounding Threadless to leading engineering for the Obama 2012 campaign. He joined Tim for a conversation about what happens once software becomes less a product and more a medium for expressing values, and why that shift has made what Harper calls "conviction collapse" (the point where a product pipeline moves so fast there's no time to actually fall in love with what you're building) a real risk. With 2389 Research, the company he runs with his partner, Dylan Richard, Harper has been answering that by treating the product itself as optional, letting an accumulation of small, working experiments define what the company becomes, an approach he compares to the old Unix philosophy of small programs built to scratch a specific itch. Some of those experiments got playful. 2389 built an internal social network where its coding agents post updates, pick names, and develop personalities (Harper's own agent goes by Doctor Biz), and early evals suggested letting agents have fun barely hurt task performance while making the work far more enjoyable to watch. On the cost side, Harper described Thrifty, a skill 2389 just released that pairs a strong model for planning with a cheaper model for execution, cutting token costs by roughly 64% compared to Opus at equal quality. But underneath all the experimentation runs a deep humanism: How do we make sure that everybody—workers and users, privileged and not-so-privileged alike—benefit from transformations AI promises (or threatens, depending on your outlook)? It’s a question animating everything from AI tool adoption to the values an organization professes to society writ large. "I want to make sure the beauty and fun I had over my career doing technology...maintains," Harper explained, "because that's the reason I'm here." Follow O'Reilly on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oreilly/ Facebook: http://facebook.com/OReilly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oreillymedia BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/oreilly.bsky.social TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@oreillymedia