The structures these people worked with seemed painfully bulky to 
Hackworth, even though he'd done it himself for a few years. The people here in 
Merkle Hall were all working on mass-market consumer products, which by and 
large were not very demanding. They worked in symbiosis with big software that 
handled repetitive aspects of the job. It was a fast way to design products, 
which was essential when going after the fickle and impressionable consumer 
market. But systems designed that way always ended up being enormous. An 
automated design system could always make something work by throwing more atoms 
at it.