On a more abstract level I feel he was trying to enable/enhance deep work, just this particular implementation didn't fly the way he expected it to. Instead of

On a more abstract level I feel he was trying to enable/enhance deep work, just this particular implementation didn't fly the way he expected it to. Instead of targeting people who are somewhat annoyed by slack and the like I believe the whole value proposal should be more along the lines of promoting the concept and benefits of deep work. I've actually been following Derrick and the development of level on GitHub. The code is open source. It's remarkably well engineered and I use it as a source of reference for my own codebases. So while probably unintentional, he's already helped others by building it.