Reading this may give the impression that non-api-decoupled things like e.g. ls or curl or inkscape cannot be developed in parallel. Also, think of it this way

Reading this may give the impression that non-api-decoupled things like e.g. ls or curl or inkscape cannot be developed in parallel. Also, think of it this way: if there was no general purpose API, it could be (figuratively) May instead of August when you did N and N+1. I mean, there’s no guarantee that it would, but this potential benefit is relative to a different baseline than in TFA.