Everything Is Becoming Non-Linear
When film editing stopped being physical, Hollywood reshuffled. The same thing is happening to every recording we used to sit through.
Sometimes rereading is more valuable than consuming more. I’ve been revisiting Reshuffle by Sangeet Paul Choudary, and one section, on how non-linear editing changed Hollywood, has stuck with me.
Film used to be literally cut. Rearranging a scene meant taping and re-taping, and a mistake could cost days. The whole industry organized itself around that constraint. Then non-linear editing made cuts reversible, and the logic of the system changed:
“Junior editors leapfrogged veterans because software fluency mattered more than muscle memory with film. Shooting ratios exploded.”
More than 30 years later, the same shift is happening to everything we used to consume start to finish. Take the meeting. For most companies, a recorded meeting was a file nobody watched. Tools like Fireflies make it something you can query: what did we commit to, who raised the pricing concern, what changed since last month. The recording becomes an archive you can ask questions of. Sales calls, support tickets, and codebases are going the same way, and when they do, three things follow.
Capture explodes. When reviewing was expensive, recording everything wasn’t worth it. Once it’s searchable, it is. Every meeting gets recorded, every customer call gets transcribed, every demo gets saved.
Analysis opens up. It stops being a specialist’s job. Tennis is a sport I follow closely, and the level of play has never been higher. It’s hard not to think that access to analysis, once reserved for top coaches, is part of why.
Fluency beats muscle memory. The person who is good at interrogating the archive leapfrogs the person whose edge was having sat through all of it. A new hire who knows how to ask the right questions of six months of calls can get up to speed faster than someone who was in the room. Knowing which question to ask becomes the skill.
Software meetings get reshuffled twice
In a software organization, this goes a level further. Fireflies makes the recording of a meeting queryable. Claude Code makes the subject of the meeting queryable. Your architecture and your actual implementation are sitting in front of you, and you can query them while the discussion is happening.
That changes what a technical meeting is. Instead of speculating about how something works and leaving with a long list of action items that never get followed up on, you validate findings in real time and use the system itself to explore options as you discuss them. “What would break if we changed this?” gets answered in the room.
It changes project management too. Status used to move in a straight line: a developer finishes, checks in code, updates the ticket, and then demos the feature. Your project manager waited at the end of that line. Now they can get a real status update straight from the systems, in the meeting, without waiting on anyone.
And it changes who gets heard. A non-technical manager, an architect, or a developer can advocate for themselves by showing their artifacts in real time instead of describing them from memory. That’s fluency beating muscle memory again. The edge goes to whoever can ask the system the right question in the moment.
What’s still being cut on celluloid in your business?
Look for what people still sit through start to finish: recordings, tickets, reports, logs. Ask who holds power because of it, and what you would capture if reviewing it were free. That’s usually where the most useful AI work is hiding.
This post started as a voice note to a founder friend, then an email to another founder friend, and now this article. A few years ago, each step would have meant starting over. Instead I reshuffled it. Cuts are reversible now, so draft first. That’s the whole point of the book, and I recommend it. Choudary’s own guide is here: The Bento Box Guide to the Reshuffle.