Finish the underside

A carpenter making a table will, at some point, have to decide how to finish the underside. The underside is the part that no buyer will ever look at. The varnish you put there will not make the table look any better when guests are gathering around it. The sanding you do will not be admired. Many respectable table makers even argue it will not meaningfully prevent moisture or improve the table’s lifetime. The table will look just as good on the showroom floor. The financial return on the underside-work is, by any short-term calculation, zero.

But you have to finish the underside.

When it comes to digital products, especially with AI making it easier than ever to ship, there is often this argument: this part won’t be seen and the product should run without it, so it doesn’t need to be done. It is a damaging mentality. The part that won’t be seen is part of the same thing as the part that will be seen, and to do one well and the other carelessly is to do neither well.

You will often hear the argument that if a feature does not appear, it is wasted effort. If the reader will never see how many attempts it took a writer to get the point across, it is easy to decide that the first pass is good enough. If something will rarely be seen, it becomes acceptable for it to be rough, unfinished, less carefully made than the parts that will. This is the logic of the inferior table.

The result is products that eventually crumble: when the user does something unexpected, the unmade parts reveal themselves, and the user experiences what was always true: that the thing was never whole.

I try my best to resist this. I try my best to finish the underside not because the user, or the reader, will notice, but because making a table is making a table. The completeness is not for the user’s eyes; it is for the maker’s self-image. I hope I pass this test for every project I undertake.

This also is a position about what kind of relation you have to the person interacting with what you made. The maker who optimizes only the visible parts is in an adversarial or at best transactional relation. The maker who finishes the underside is in a different relation: I will give you the thing, all of it, including the parts you cannot inspect.

We come to recognize, after enough exposure, which makers we can trust. We cannot always say why. But we know. The maker has been answering, in the unseen parts, a question we did not consciously ask, and we have felt the answer, and the respect.

Ahmed Soliman