The thing that gets you to the thing
Why we build design systems, AI tools, and everything else
“Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets you to the thing.”
- Joe Macmillan, Halt and Catch Fire
I catch myself thinking about that line a lot.
I watched Halt and Catch Fire when it first aired (apparently one of the few!), and I’ve rewatched it multiple times since then. Season 4 is the one that stays with me. It’s quiet, but it’s also set in the early 1990s, so it resonates with my teenage years. That time, CRT monitors and dial-up modem tones, connects.
There’s a point in that season when Haley starts building what will become Comet, a web directory to help people find things. She's driven, awkward, and thoughtful. Some it reminds me of myself at that age, and of people I knew. I wasn’t exactly like her, I see a lot of her sister Joanie, too. That brash facade and teenage desire for cool. I hovered in-between - like I imagine a lot of people do. Nerdy, shy, challenging, curious, sometimes confident at the wrong time. Maybe I’m still like that.
That early internet felt like that, too. A space where you could be multiple things at once, real or made up. Not polished or professional, not corporate, it was more raw and personal. Anyone could muck around and make a website. They weren’t sanitized, either. Little, clumsy, reflections of ourselves. A secret hideout for a shy mind, or an exaggerated avatar hoping to be edgy. We were the first people mapping out new places that didn’t exist yet, and hoping that maybe someone might show up (…which we’d measure with a handy page view counter!).
Halt and Catch Fire captured that feeling with really startling accuracy. The show still resonates for me because, at its core, it understands that the value of technology is never the technology itself. It’s what it makes possible.
That’s why Joe’s quote - “the thing that gets us to the thing” - isn’t just a pithy line. It’s a philosophy that I believe in, and which I’ve tried to hold onto in professional life.
Nobody ever builds a design system for the sake of having a design system.
We build one so that people can move faster. To help teams share things more easily, duplicate less effort, ship better stuff. It lets an organization scale without losing its soul.
You build a design system because of what it enables.
Same with the web. Same with AI. Same with almost every piece of technology that ends up mattering. The tool isn’t the endpoint. The endpoint is people, doing things, making things, finding each other. They're not buying a hammer, they’re buying the nail in a wall to hang their picture.
It’s why I’m cautious but also hopeful about where AI might go. We’re in a place we’ve been before; new technology, new capabilities, feels a bit magical, feels a bit confusing. Maybe even a little bit threatening. And people are reaching for the wrong thing. They’re trying to make the tool the product (“it’s got AI in it!”). But AI isn’t the product. It’s not the business. It’s not even the system.
AI is a new thing that gets us to the thing.
The danger is if we forget that. If we make the mistake (as we often do) of making the tool the point, then we’ll put together some really impressive systems that don’t serve anyone’s needs. Or maybe worse, systems that reinforce the worst of our incentives; choosing speed over thought, growth without ethics, making without caring.
So I’ll come back again to that same old line.
Nobody ever builds a design system for the sake of having a design system.
And nobody should ever build with AI just to say that they did. We want to build with AI so that people can do more, with better tools, in more human ways.
The tech isn’t what gives things meaning. That’s the people.
We still have a lot to be hopeful for in this current wave, to have things worth us building. We can take that chance to reconnect with that meaning. Remembering that behind all our models and systems and platforms, people are still trying to find something. Or someone. Or maybe themselves.
That’s what we should be building for.
Next week in Field Notes, I’ll explore how this philosophy plays out in practice. Can we build systems that serve people so well they become invisible? If this piece was the why, that one will be a practical, tactical, and grounded how-to in the reality of enterprise environments.
Further reading:
Halt and Catch Fire, AMC (2014-2017). IMDB link.
Gonzalez, Kathryn. Design Systems and Infrastructure — where design and engineering meet. Medium, July 2018.