I didn’t start building All Me because I wanted to write policies.

I started because I wanted to build something people would actually use a fast, clean, intuitive social platform where the experience just works. The kind of product where you catch up with friends daily, the responsiveness of the UI, the elegance of the onboarding flow. That’s the work that feels real. That’s the work that moves the product forward.

But somewhere along the way, we hit this wall: policies.

Community guidelines. Terms of use. Privacy policies. Acceptable use rules. Suddenly, instead of shipping features, I’m sitting there trying to figure out how to phrase something like “prohibited conduct” in a way that’s legally sound and globally applicable. It’s hard to describe how jarring that shift is if you’re used to building systems instead of sentences.

The frustrating part isn’t that policies don’t matter, I get that they do. It’s that they feel completely disconnected from the reason we started building All Me in the first place. When I’m coding, I can see progress instantly. A feature goes live, something improves, users benefit. When I’m writing policies, it feels like I’m working on problems that don’t even exist yet. Hypothetical abuse cases. Edge scenarios. Worst-case behavior.

It’s all defensive.

And it slows everything down.

As developers, we’re wired to build, test, iterate. Policy work doesn’t fit that loop. Every sentence has to be precise. You can’t just “ship and fix later” when the risk is legal exposure or user harm. So instead of moving fast, you end up second-guessing wording, thinking about jurisdictions, trying to cover every possible misuse of the platform. It’s mentally draining in a completely different way.

There’s also the simple reality that most of us aren’t trained for this. I know how to design systems, not legal frameworks. I can optimize a database query, but writing a privacy clause that holds up across regions? That’s not exactly in the typical developer toolkit. So what should be straightforward ends up taking way longer than it should.

And all the while, the actual product is sitting there waiting to be built.

That’s the part that really gets to me. Every hour spent on policies is an hour not spent improving the platform. Not refining the user experience. Not fixing bugs. Not building the features that will actually make people stick around. When you’re trying to gain traction, that trade-off feels brutal.

At the same time, I can’t ignore the reality: if we don’t get the policies right, the platform won’t hold up anyway.

Because policies aren’t just documents they shape everything. What content is allowed affects moderation tools. Data policies affect how we design storage and permissions. Rules about behavior affect reporting systems and enforcement workflows. If we skip this step, we’re just creating bigger problems for ourselves later.

That doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

It just means we have to do it.

So yeah, writing policies for All Me feels like the least exciting part of the job. It’s slow, it’s unfamiliar, and it pulls us away from the work we actually enjoy. But it’s also one of those things you can’t ignore if you want to build something that lasts.

I just wish it felt a bit more like building and a bit less like writing rules for things we hope never happen.