Shipping a Universe: A Post-Mortem

A PM–Dev dialogue about shipping a universe — and discovering that time is not a dependency, but a consequence.

Try to picture no time.

Not frozen. Not paused.

Literally no before, no after. No moment you could wait through.

Even the idea of stillness sneaks in an ordering — something that could change. Remove that, and there is no sequence to appeal to. No forward. No backward.

This isn’t a limitation of imagination. It’s a signal.

Time is not something added at setup. It appears the instant a system supports distinctions that must be ordered.
The moment consequences exist—when choosing X instead of Y constrains what can also be true—an ordering appears. That ordering is what we call time.

Here’s how a Product Manager and a deliberately obtuse Dev discovered that, one build at a time.

Build 0 — Just Space

PM: Need a universe. Keep it minimal. No matter, no energy — just space.
Dev: Any requirements beyond “exists”?
PM: Yes. It has to matter.
Dev: You said “no matter!”.
PM: Constraints. Consequences. If one possibility excludes another, the system should reflect that.
Dev: Shipping infinite space. Perfectly uniform. Nothing in it.

PM: What state is the universe in?
Dev: …Yes
PM: That’s not a state…
Dev: …It is

A perfectly uniform universe has no internal contrast. No alternatives. No distinctions.

It technically exists, but it cannot produce more than a single description of itself. There is nothing to compare, nothing to order, nothing to record.

A book where every page is identical has pages, but turning them doesn’t take you anywhere. There is no meaningful direction through it.

PM: Does it have time?
Dev: No. You haven’t asked for “time”.
It’s perfect. One state, nothing changes, no “forever” or “never” or “deadline” to speak of.

Time does not exist first to allow change. Change — in the sense of distinguishable alternatives — is what allows time to exist.

Build 1 — Stuff That Bumps

PM: Add particles. Let them interact. Make the interactions destructive.
Dev: Done.
Particles collide. Outcomes differ. Some configurations prevent others.

PM: Ship it.
Dev: No can do!
To define a collision, I had to assume a background.
I’m writing interactions onto sticky notes: coordinates, timestamps, outcomes.
The system now has time because I faked it.

A collision requires:
- “near” and “far” (a notion of space)
- “before” and “after” (a notion of time)
- rules for “same place, same moment” (geometry bookkeeping)
Classical physics creates relationships inside spacetime, but it assumes spacetime already exists.
It places relations inside spacetime, but quietly treats spacetime itself as a given.
We gained consequences by borrowing an unexplained backdrop that nothing in our system interacts with.

PM: What if order emerged from the data?
Dev: Like a side effect?
PM: Like a side effect!
Dev: Wat?!… <thinking intensely> It’s weird, it sounds impossible, and I hate that this just might work. Let me try something.

Build 2 — Make Relations Fundamental

Dev: New approach. I stopped starting with things and asked what constrains what. Instead of particles in space, I defined relations directly.

PM: But why does ordering go one direction? Why can’t we just reverse it?
Dev: Because “undo” isn’t forbidden — it’s just insanely rare.
If you only track the big picture, there are a billion ways to become “more scrambled” and basically no ways to become “less scrambled” unless the micro-details are tuned just right.
So the direction we call “future” is the direction in which information about the past gets dispersed into details we don’t track.
These are the irreversible consequences that you requested.

Space and time aren’t inputs; they’re bookkeeping forced by constraints and their updates.
Time points toward the direction where the system hides its correlations.

PM: So we have to have entropy to have a narrative. What happens without relations at all, can we remove them too?
Dev: No. You don’t just get a simpler universe — you get isolated facts with no mutual constraints. Nothing prevents contradictions. Nothing orders possibilities. Nothing accumulates.

Without relations, there is no structure. Without structure, there is no ordering. Without ordering, there is no time. Without an asymmetry of ‘undo,’ there’s no story.

The glue isn’t optional. The relations are the universe. Everything else is a description layered on top.

Where Time Stops Being Magic

PM: Build 1 had time. What’s different now?
Dev: It had time because we put it there as an ingredient — an unexplained backdrop.
Now time emerges from relations.
We’re not assuming a clock — the universe generates its own.

PM: How?
Dev: The whole system doesn’t need an external clock.
But inside the system, some part can play the role of a clock.
Other parts then have states “relative to that clock reading t” — not “at external time t”.

PM: So time was always there once we had change.
But now we know why it’s there.
Dev: Exactly.
Before, time was magic — present but unexplained.
Now it’s accounting.
Structure creates relations, relations create ordering, ordering is time.
We didn’t add time. It emerged when we added consequences.
PM: Release!

NIT: What “Consequences” Secretly Required

We kept failing until we had all the requirements:

• Distinction gives multiple descriptions.
• Relations create constraints (not everything can co-exist).
• Change produces sequences of constraint-updates.
• Consistency makes sequences composable.
• Accumulation (memory) lets patterns matter because they can be carried forward and compared.
• Irreversibility Given a low-entropy start, entropy makes the observed ordering overwhelmingly likely to flow one direction

These aren’t preferences. They’re failure modes. Remove any one, and the concept of “a universe over time” dissolves.

Space is how constraints show up as “near” and “far.”
Time is how change shows up as “before” and “after.”

A universe doesn’t begin with time.
Time begins when the universe stops being meaningless.