Descriptions:
Tuomas Artman, CTO of Linear, joins Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) at the AI Engineer conference for a candid conversation about software craft in an era when AI tools like Claude Code with Opus 4.5 make shipping dramatically faster. The central argument: when engineering effort is no longer the bottleneck, the risk shifts to teams saying “yes” to too many features — producing bloated, confusing products that fail end users. Artman invokes Steve Jobs’s famous “say no to 999 things” principle as the new competitive moat.
Artman draws a direct analogy to his time at Uber during hypergrowth — where speed-at-all-costs created technical and experiential debt — and argues that today’s AI-enabled velocity creates the same pressure at every company simultaneously. His answer is taste: deliberate design coherence, deep customer listening (never shipping requests verbatim), and maintaining a strong “no” culture even as raw output capacity explodes.
The conversation includes a detailed look at Linear’s internal “Quality Wednesdays” — a weekly 37-minute ritual where all ~25 engineers each share one quality fix, ranging from single-pixel UI tweaks to backend efficiency gains. Artman traces this practice to a formative exercise where the team found 35 distinct problems in a single small menu view. For engineering leaders navigating the speed-vs-craft tension that AI tools are forcing into the open, this is a frank and experience-grounded perspective from one of the industry’s most quality-focused product teams.
📺 Source: AI Engineer · Published April 21, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
