The Premise: The Lead User and the Machines That Build Machines

2026-07-05 · source · source ↗ · raw capture · wiki page

Author: Brad Feld Published: May 29, 2026 · 5 min read Source: Feld Thoughts

Key Background

Feld studied under Eric von Hippel at MIT (he dropped out of the Ph.D. program but von Hippel remained a mentor). Around 1978, von Hippel argued that "innovation comes from users, not manufacturers" — a radical claim at a time when manufacturers were assumed to be the source of ideas and users mere recipients. Von Hippel spent the next 48 years building an academic foundation for this view.

His Lead User research identifies people who encounter needs before the broader market and build their own solutions. Von Hippel's concept of sticky information holds that the knowledge needed to solve problems is expensive to move — it resides with the user, not the manufacturer. Feld sees free and open source software as the clearest proof of this framework, since "the user and the manufacturer collapsed into the same person."

Feld's own doctoral research examined the boundary between user and manufacturer, a question he says he's been pondering for almost 40 years.

The Core Premise

Feld's central claim: All future end-user software innovation will come from the user — not most, but all. The first half extends von Hippel's thesis to a software-saturated world. The second half is new: machines should be able to build that software fully automatically.

"The user has the need and the sticky information. The machine has the ability to write, test, and ship the software." Feld argues the boundary he studied for decades is about to dissolve because "the manufacturer is becoming a machine that the user operates."

He recounts building a small plugin earlier in 2026, describing himself as The First User — riffing on von Hippel's Lead User. He didn't build it to sell it; he needed it. The user was himself, the machine acted as manufacturer, and "the boundary between us was a prompt."

Related Concepts

Feld points to Dan Shapiro's writing on the Software Factory and Dark Factory — a spectrum from "spicy autocomplete" to fully automated factories where no engineer writes code.

What Feld Is Building

Rather than theorize, Feld has spent six months building "multiple machines that build and run machines" — all software machines. He deliberately uses the word "machine" instead of "agent," calling "agent" a meaningless buzzword. A machine has defined inputs, outputs, and a job; the term forces specificity.

He revisits his older concept of The Three Machines (Product, Customer, Company) as a way to think about organizational structure, applying Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (from The Goal) to figure out where to focus: find the constraint, fix it, repeat.

This work is a current project with his brother Daniel at intensitymagic.com. Feld says it might become a company, might fail, or might lead somewhere else entirely. He reports learning a tremendous amount and enjoying working with his brother.

Philosophy & Approach