Ideas Weave Every Narrative with AI.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that creativity requires a $2,000 laptop, but the truth is, modern software is just badly written. By running Photoshop on a £0.60 microcontroller, we expose the absurdity of the upgrade treadmill. The chip isn’t underpowered; our expectations are just over-calibrated.
Weather data is tiny — a few bytes of JSON. Yet typical weather apps consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM. The real inefficiency isn’t the app; it’s the entire OS and GUI stack it runs on. An ESP32 with an ePaper screen can do the same job with a few kilobytes. Efficiency is a design choice we’ve stopped making.
A single executable TUI email client with no JavaScript, Docker, or NodeJS. It’s faster than any Electron app, proves that subtraction is the real innovation. MailChat challenges the assumption that software must be complex to be powerful.
A solo developer built a sub-200KB Python compiler that now runs a company’s production app. This proves that every bloated runtime you’ve accepted is a choice, not a necessity. One person did it in six months. What’s your excuse?
Meta’s products aren’t terrible because of bad engineering. They’re deliberately slow because the company prioritizes data extraction (telemetry) over user experience. With a monopoly on the social graph, Meta can afford to degrade performance — your frustration is the price of their ad revenue.
For fifteen years, developers have rebuilt Notational Velocity, each time adding features that pushed users away. The real problem isn’t a lack of functionality — it’s our inability to stop adding. Minimalism isn’t a feature set; it’s a permanent discipline. The best note-taking app is the one you stop building.