Ideas Weave Every Narrative with AI.
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.
Your new laptop is faster on paper but feels slower in use. The culprit isn’t hardware – it’s software bloat, abstraction layers, and an industry that prioritized developer speed over user experience. This article exposes the betrayal and offers a radical fix: stop upgrading your hardware and start auditing your software.
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.