For Those Who Come After

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Yes, this is a reference to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I absolutely love that game.

While playing it, I noticed a recurring theme that also appears in many other works I admire: much of what we do today is for people we may never meet. Even when that impact is invisible or impossible to measure, it is no less meaningful.

Let’s look at a few examples. I’ll intentionally keep the context brief to avoid drifting too far from the main discussion.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Among the many themes explored throughout the game, one stood out to me in particular: every step of the journey is just as important as reaching the destination.

Early in the story, conversations with the people of Lumière reveal that many have begun to lose faith in the purpose and success of the expeditions. The members of Expedition 33, however, speak about the previous expeditions with genuine admiration. Much of what they know was built by those who came before them, directly or indirectly, through everything they left behind: strategies, equipment, and resources.

As we explore the world, we constantly encounter things left behind by previous expeditions: grappling hooks that make difficult paths accessible, journals filled with discoveries, and traces of people who kept moving forward even after realizing they would never complete their mission.

While Expedition 33 remains focused on its primary objective, the earlier expeditions spent enormous effort making the world more navigable and establishing relationships with friendly characters. Many of their journals reveal a quiet sense of pride. Even knowing they might fail, they understood that what they accomplished would matter to those who came after.

Death Stranding

Death Stranding didn’t capture my attention at first. The more I learned about it, however, the more intrigued I became until I finally decided to play it.

Among its many ideas, one stood above the rest for me: seeing structures built by other players appear in my own world. A rope left by one player made climbing a mountain easier. A ladder placed by another helped me cross a river. Later, someone would leave a “Like” because they had used the equipment I stored in a shared shelter.

Realizing that what I built in my world could help someone else’s changed the way I played. I paved roads long after I personally needed them, because someone else eventually would.

Eventually, I realized I wasn’t building roads because I needed them anymore. I was building them because someone else might.

Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

From the beginning of the story, it is clear that developing and proving the heliocentric theory will take years, perhaps even generations.

The characters understand that they may never finish the work themselves. Their role may simply be to become one more step in the staircase leading toward the final goal.

One character initially rejects this idea, insisting that if he cannot be the one to publish the theory, then it should disappear with him. Part of his journey is accepting that being one step in that staircase is meaningful precisely because the staircase exists only through the accumulation of many such steps.

One quote stayed with me throughout the story:

“Being wrong doesn’t mean it was all for nothing.”

The Common Thread

Once I noticed this pattern, I began recognizing it in many other stories I already admired: Attack on Titan, Down With the System by Serj Tankian, Final Fantasy VII, among many others.

You rarely know who will be affected by what you build today. Most of the time, you’ll never even meet them.

That is what connects all of these stories:

• In Expedition 33, people leave behind resources they know they will never use themselves
• In Death Stranding, players help complete strangers they will never meet
• In Orb, researchers continue work knowing another generation may ultimately finish it
• In Down With the System, struggles matter because they become part of a legacy passed to future generations
• In Attack on Titan, each generation of the Survey Corps inherits the knowledge and sacrifices of those who came before

The more I reflected on these stories, the more I realized that software development follows the same pattern. We:

• Invest in code quality so future changes can happen in a controlled and maintainable environment
• Build reusable components so the same solutions don’t need to be reinvented
• Automate repetitive work so people can focus on problems that truly require creativity
• Write documentation so future decisions are informed by the reasoning behind past ones
• Invest in observability so the next incident can be understood and resolved more quickly
• Design architectures that can evolve alongside the product, the business, and its users

Everything we do today shapes tomorrow. We do these things without any guarantee that we’ll ever see their impact. Perhaps no one will read the documentation. Perhaps the monitoring alerts will never trigger. Perhaps the architecture will never need to scale that far.

We build them anyway. Not only for ourselves, but for those who come after.

Sustainability

The more I think about architecture, the more I associate it with sustainability. Not just environmental sustainability, but sustainability in its broadest sense:

• Environmental sustainability, by reducing the ecological footprint of the products we build
• Financial sustainability, by maximizing the return on every investment made
• Team sustainability, by creating an environment where people can grow, collaborate, and find purpose in their work
• Business sustainability, by balancing product evolution with the technology that enables it

All of these share the same underlying principle: making decisions that continue creating value long after we are gone.

Every project we join was started by someone else, and one day someone else will continue it after us. Just like those expeditions, we’re part of a journey much larger than ourselves. Every step we take helps those who come after.

What experiences or stories shaped the way you think about building for the future? I’d love to hear them in the comments.