Teller describes the underlying principle like so: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” Allen Pike: An Unreasonable Amount of Time And if you look at it from the other direction, that means that you - yes, you personally 🫵 - have the opportunity to produce magical experiences without any “secret sauce” beyond your willingness to put in the work. But it might not come easily. Progress Everyone who writes code goes through this emotional journey. It’s an uphill battle figuring out the basics. Finally, you get the hang of it. You’re capable of doing anything you want, and that feeling is the highest of highs. Then you hit the lows: when you realize all the interesting parts are farmed out to tech companies doing the real heavy lifting. You started to build your perfect life management app, but your personal contribution is 100% glue code, between Google and Plaid and OpenAI and Twilio and Home Assistant and a dozen other services. When you want to do something and get stuck because there’s no off-the-shelf API to deal with it, that’s the worst feeling of all: realizing that you were never that powerful to begin with. Everyone who writes code goes through this. Everyone who creates anything goes through this. Having learned to code before LLMs, I can only imagine how hard it is now - easier to get a taste of the good life, harder still to learn the skills needed to make it great. It’s disillusioning to realize you’ve come so far from the start, but you’re still so far from making an impact. Even those cool algorithms fade away as you write your hundredth boring business logic if-statement. Is this all there is? It’s easy to get jaded. But as you keep going, you find that you can make a difference. You pick up domain experience and life experience, novel insights, and the ability to contribute. Maybe you find yourself spending a nonsensical amount of time chipping away at some problem (and writing a lot of if-statements to do so); after all, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. Back to the workshop The funny thing about software is that the magic does become invisible. Teller can only dig up so many boxes in a week, but a $5 cloud server can easily do millions of requests. Just about every application is built on top of other people’s abstractions, wrapped up so neatly that you never have to think about the insides. The founder of Twilio talked about the before-times so much that they became familiar, like a bedtime story: it used to be that if you wanted to connect to a telecom company, they’d quote you five years and millions of dollars to get hooked up. Then he’d live-code the Twilio way in less than five minutes and one dollar. Like magic: you never saw the true amount of investment and preparation and effort and time behind it. At my current job at Stytch (note: my writing is always my own here, never my employer’s), I often show a demo where we detect a malicious bot and block it. But it’s rare that we peel back the curtain to show all the infrastructure we built to understand what real users and browsers look like, and what tools bad actors are using to try to avoid detection, and the subtle warning flags that can be picked up if you know what to look for. It’s unbelievable how much software is like that: built on hours, weeks, years of running every version of countless browsers, peeking into private forums to learn about the latest anti-detect, and god-knows-whatever’s-needed to send a text message. It’s rare to make progress through a genuinely new technical advancement. But every day, someone is putting in unreasonable effort and making things better. Someone listened to all those recordings of birdsong so that I can identify the white-crowned sparrows whistling up in the trees. Back in high school band camp (really), someone gifted me a quote that has stuck as a starred thought in my mind ever since - There are three phases in life: First, you believe in Santa. Then, you don’t believe in Santa. Finally, you become Santa. Are you shaking your head at the naivete? Or are you ready to deliver some presents? — 2025-07-18: edited - thanks Jason Cohen (A Smart Bear) for feedback.