What Is It For
Aristotle thought everything had a final cause — a telos, the end it exists for. An acorn is for becoming an oak. A knife is for cutting. To understand a thing, he said, know what it’s aimed at, not just what it’s made of. Modern science threw this out for physics, rightly — rocks don’t fall because they yearn for the ground. But for anything humans make, the final cause never went away. It just got forgotten, which is worse.
Ask an engineer what their service does and they’ll describe mechanism. It ingests events, writes to a queue, reconciles balances. Ask what it’s for and you often get a blank look, or a restatement of the mechanism. This gap is where most bad software comes from. A system that knows its mechanism but not its telos optimizes the wrong things with great precision. It gets faster at a job nobody needed done.
I’ve watched teams spend a quarter shaving latency off a path that existed only because of a decision two years stale. Beautiful work, real engineering, aimed at nothing. They knew the how perfectly and had lost the what-for completely. The code didn’t lie to them. It just couldn’t tell them it had outlived its reason.
The final-cause question is brutal precisely because it’s simple. What is this for? Hold it against any feature, any meeting, any company, and watch most of them fail to answer cleanly. Half of what we build exists because something near it exists, the way a bureaucracy grows forms to process forms. The mechanism becomes self-justifying. The telos evaporated and nobody noticed, because the machine kept running.
This is also the right lens for ambition, and it’s where it stops being abstract. People chase money, titles, a bigger team — mechanism, all of it. The honest question is what those are for. Money is for buying back time and choice. If you’re earning it by spending all your time and choice, you’ve confused means with end and built a machine that defeats its own purpose with perfect efficiency. A title is for getting leverage to do the work you care about. If the title becomes the work, the telos is gone.
There’s a reason founders talk about mission and engineers roll their eyes. The eye-roll is earned — most mission statements are decoration. But the underlying instinct is Aristotle’s and it’s correct. A company is a thing built for an end, and when the end is clear you can cut ruthlessly: anything not serving the telos is waste, however elegant. When the end is fuzzy, every feature seems defensible and the product bloats into incoherence.
So I ask one question before the how-questions: what is this for? Not what does it do. What is it aimed at. If I can’t answer in a sentence a smart outsider would accept, I don’t understand the thing well enough to build it. I only understand the parts. And parts that don’t add up to an aim are just an expensive way to stay busy. Which, for the record, describes most of the industry on most days.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.