For all organizations, the Golden Path ends with a clear organizational objective. For Spotify, that objective is the creation of music and digital content streaming services. The diversity of ways that the Golden Path ends for companies is unlimited, ranging from defense systems to medical devices to consumer electronics. We could imagine each of these end software applications as distinct animal species as varied as life itself, each fully formed animal represents the differentiated "thing" engineering teams set out to build.
Every animal alive was built from a single fertilized egg cell, the zygote. From that one cell, all of the different cells were grown and organized to manifest a fully differentiated animal. This is the process of ontogeny, and represents an intuititive analogy to the software development process. It begins with the zygote, a single cell with unlimited flexibility that represents the foundational programming languages used to create any software imaginable. The process of software ontogeny, then, directly maps to the concept of the Golden Path, so it's worthwhile to examine the insights found in ontogeny.
The zygote's journey from one cell to trillions of diverse, perfectly related skin cells, muscle cells, and brain cells, etc., involves a process of differentiation. The zygote contniues to divide into omnipotent stem cells, which can literally become anything. These further divide into slightly more specialized pluripotent stem cells, which can become many things. These then divide into the myriad different specific cell types. What we can see then, is that in the process of differentiation represents a process of creating cells that are more useful for specific functions, but also less flexible. In other words, in the search for utility, there is a general tendency to sacrifice flexibility. Importantly, there is no going back. The process is one-way: once differentiation has occured, flexibility is lost.
Software teams use shared libraries and frameworks, so of course software application design is supported by more than just the programming language. But the build process involves a leap from source code and libraries to fully formed application, a jump from zygote straight to fully differentiated animal, without an intermediate "pre-differentiated" stem cell stage of composition, design, and maintenance. A key role of the Virtuoso infrastructure is to expand upon the differentiation process and highlight the importance of ontogenic flexibility in the creation of radically powerful Golden Path possibilities. As no-code infrastructure, Virtuoso represents a dramatic expansion of a "pre-differentiated" stage of development between zygote, or source code, and fully differentiated animal, or end software solution. However, there is another dimensions of flexibility key to the creation of Golden Paths in addition to ontogenic flexibility, which we call metabolic flexibility.