The client who raised our standards

I saw my friend Matt Grace in person today. He was one of the first clients at Trio. We worked together for a long time, and somewhere along the way, a client became a friend.

In the early days, Matt was tough on us. He cared about the quality of the code, what we delivered, and how our engineers communicated. Working with him could be challenging for me.

But he had a huge positive effect on Trio. We improved how we hired. We improved how we built software and how we talked with each other. His standards became part of how our team worked.

Seeing him today was fun. And talking about AI with someone who helped shape our standards brought up an interesting question: what should an engineer be good at now?

We agreed that engineers need good taste. By taste, I mean a sense of what makes a product good to use. Does this choice make sense? Is this something someone would enjoy using? Being able to build something is part of the work. Deciding what is worth building matters too.

We also talked about spending more time together in person. Both of us felt that teams building software would need more of that connection. There is excitement in being around people, sharing ideas, and getting to know each other.

Then the conversation went somewhere harder to answer. We wondered how soon AI might be as creative as people. But what about feelings?

I brought up music. AI can make a song that makes someone happy or sad. That made me think about the difference between creating something that moves a person and having that feeling yourself.

When I sit across from someone, there is also a lot happening inside me that they can’t see. Memories, thoughts, feelings. I don’t know how far AI will go. But I keep coming back to that part of being human: having an experience, and wanting to share it with another person.

Matt helped us become better at our work by caring deeply about how we did it. Years later, I got to sit with him as a friend and talk about what comes next. The tools have changed a lot. I’m glad that relationship is still here.