The Frog in the Well

I failed Computer Science in high school. I'm studying accounting in college. I am, by every reasonable measure, not the person who should be writing this.

But three internships in three industries taught me something most software engineers will never see.

I didn't learn what FDE meant from a blog post. I learned it from three internships where I watched smart people do stupid things, and nobody around them knew it was stupid.

Private equity firm (2023): Hundreds of interns. Powerful CRM, genuinely good leads, real money on the table. The job: copy-paste the same boilerplate outreach message to every lead. Hundreds of interns, all doing the exact same thing, by hand, every day.

I built a pipeline that replaced the work of 200 interns and personalized every message at the click of a button. They didn't want to pay me for the tool. Cited my work contract. Hell nah, I left.

Fuel company, $5B in revenue (2024). I was a tax accounting intern. I watched two CPAs (people who passed one of the most rigorous certifications in the country) manually copy-paste customer addresses, one by one, to look up tax rates. This was 50 percent of their job. This is what the company pays them to do. Mindless. Their specialization is needed elsewhere but their time is soaked up here. One week. I find my own shapefiles, build a Python pipeline (a few hundred lines of code), done. Whole company's fuel tax calculations, automated.

Civil engineering firm (2025). Engineers eyeballing 50 years of time series data, trying to pattern-match temporal sequences visually. With their eyes. Took them 10 hours per week. I built a parsing engine with dynamic time warping that surfaced mathematically high-tier matches in seconds.

Three internships. Three industries that have nothing to do with each other. Same story every time. I wasn't in any of these companies as a software engineer. I entered each of these companies as a business intern. A SWE intern would never have been in those rooms. The reason I saw these workflows is that I was sitting next to the people doing them.

These weren't dumb companies. PE firms aren't dumb. CPAs aren't dumb. These civil engineers were incredibly smart. And yet all of these workflows were structurally insane. Nobody on the inside saw it. Not because they were stupid. Because they were the frog at the bottom of the well.

井底之蛙. You don't know what you don't know. You can't see the sky from down there. The water you swim in is the only water there is.

This is what's sitting in every traditional company in the world right now. Not a few. Every single one. Some workflow that absorbs the brainpower of three people, or thirty, or three hundred, that one person with a laptop and the right instinct could collapse in a few weeks. The bottleneck is that the people who can see the workflow can't see the AI, and the people who can see the AI never walk into the room.

YC and SF are bright and flashy right now. Founders pitching wrappers that will be murdered in the next Claude release, bragging on Twitter how they're going to scam VCs out of a seed round, building the same stupid dating app for the seventh time. The bubble is real. Many of those companies will not exist for long.

Meanwhile, there's a logistics company outside Seattle doing $80M a year, running dispatch out of a spreadsheet a guy named Dave built in 2011. Dave retired in 2019. Nobody knows how half the formulas work. They hired two people last year just to babysit the file. The owner has heard of ChatGPT because his daughter showed him. He has real revenue, real margin, and a real problem that AI can solve this afternoon.

That's where the value is. Not glamorous. Not on Twitter. A back office in a strip mall, fluorescent lights, a printer that jams, a whiteboard with last quarter's numbers still on it. Just a workflow that's been running on human brainpower for thirty years, waiting for one person to walk in and see it.

The people who can do this are not normal software engineers. A traditional SWE wants a ticket, a spec, a code review, a staging environment. None of that exists here. You walk in with nothing. The workflow lives in someone's head. Half the time the boss can't even tell you what his employees do. You have to sit next to them and watch.

You will not understand anything going in. You have to learn fast or you're cooked. You have to be able to talk to people who are nothing like you, who think AI is magic or a scam or both. You have to have tact when the boss is wrong, and you have to know when to push anyway. You have to ship something on Tuesday that you didn't understand existed on Monday.

The things you build will have no documentation. There is no way to paste it into Claude Code and have it write itself. The schema is in someone's notebook. The business logic is in an employee's head. The edge cases live in a Teams chat from 2020. You have to dig it out, structure it, and ship.

This is not for everyone.

But if you can do it (and maybe that person is you) there is a window right now that we've never seen before. Every traditional company gets distilled exactly once. Whoever does it first owns that workflow. And there are millions of these companies.

I learned this by accident. Starting from an accounting degree, three internships, and a habit of figuring shit out and building the thing when I see something too stupid to be done manually. Most of the people who'll thrive at HA7CH probably learned it the same way- from somewhere they weren't supposed to be.

The frog at the bottom of the well doesn't know the well is a well.

Let's go build some fucking ladders