What Does Great Software Look Like?
Time, care, taste and intentionality. Here are a few products I think qualify as great software.
Throughout my years as a designer and engineer (design engineer?) I've been thinking a lot about quality in things around me. Furniture, architecture, city planning, everyday things, from cups to pens to screwdrivers. And, also, of course quality in software.
In physical things, I think quality is easier to spot. You can see it on the materials, the finish, the design standing the test of time. In software, I find this more difficult. How do you define qualitative software? And, how does it tie in to agentic coding? I'm not sure. But I thought I would start with listing some products that, what I think at least, qualify as great software.
Raycast
Raycast is, among many other things, at it's core, an application launcher for your computer. See it as a replacement for Spotlight on macOS, or the start menu on Windows.
I've been using it for many years, and all I can say is, the feeling of using it is the same as you get you sit in a really nice chair. It feels well built, using proper materials that will last a liftime.
Zed
Zed is a text editor for writing code. Over the last few years, countless new code editors has entered the market. All with something in common. They're forks of VSCode.
Zed is fantastic code editor written from scratch in Rust, and you can really feel it. It's incredible fast, and using it is such a joy. The team has really though about all the little details. Everything feels intentional.
Linear
Linear is a issue tracking tool, like Jira, but built for the modern area. This product screams quality. Everything from their design library, to the performance, their offline support and finally, seamless real-time syncing.
It's all top of the line. It feels like wearing a luxury watch. It does its job, it keeps time, but when you take a peek at the inner workings, you get amazed by all the little details they've engineered to perfection.