Why altitude matters here In this channel's material, altitude comes up in a conversation with Nabeel Hyatt about what AI products get right and wrong. His point: most AI products zoom straight to an answer and leave the user wandering at low altitude — handed a conclusion with none of the structure behind it. He hunts instead for markets with best practices captured at altitude: fields where the good ways of doing the work are written down. The coding example Coding models work well, Hyatt argues, partly because coding has decades of books, PRDs, and documented best practices — not just samples of code. That captured knowledge gives the model (and the user) something to reason at a higher level with. He looks for the same structure elsewhere: therapy has rich literature on how to do it well, while a field like ludology — 'what makes a game fun' — has no language that explains Super Mario Bros. on a spreadsheet. Popping up one level The design move he wants is products that pop up one level. His first Wordware project is a startup-decision mentor: it asks what you're deciding and what your gut says, then draws on 20–30 decision theories (SWOT and others), recommends a few, and walks you through the steps — instead of 'splurting out an answer' the way a chatbot does. The trust argument The reason for surfacing alternatives is trust: > I don't necessarily trust ChatGPT to pick the right modality of therapy… just as much as I don't really trust them to pick the restaurant for me. Tell me the five different best practices and let me pick. Rather than one LLM-merged answer, the interface presents five different best practices and lets the user pick. A second, related use The word also appears in a related sense: Replit's coding agents succeed partly because of their 'altitude of reasoning' — how long the agent works before checking back, sitting in a sweet spot between a one-line Copilot and a four-hour Devin run. Same vocabulary, applied to how high-level a model's reasoning span is. - Low altitude = AI products that zoom straight to a single answer, leaving the user with no structure. - Captured at altitude = a field with documented best practices (books, PRDs, literature) the way coding has. - The design opportunity: interfaces that surface several best practices and let the user choose, rather than trusting the model to merge everything into one answer. - Related usage: an agent's 'altitude of reasoning' — how long it works before asking for feedback.