Big details

I spent three hours trying to fix something in a personal project. Three hours may not seem like a lot of time to some people. It’s an eternity for someone with two younger kids. I spent that eternity on what seems like a tiny issue. The cursor size in my writing app pissed me off—a lot.

I got hung up on this detail because it wasn’t a detail. My app is very simple. How simple? The only thing on the screen is a cursor. I can’t remember the last time I even thought about a cursor. But there it was, pissing me off.

And that’s because “little” doesn’t exist on its own. “Little” depends on “big”. A needle is little in a haystack. Not as much in a pincushion. The little cursor was now big.

Sweating the details is harder than ever

The one truism of working in software is there’s never enough time. There’s a constant fight for finite attention. Little things don’t fare well in that fight. Attention gets thrown at adding new things—as it does. The littler things get littlerer. It’s your classic reinforcing negative feedback loop.

Modern software are haystacks. There are more needles than ever, but now they’re microscopic. They’re impossible to find, but they still end up finding you. And it hurts just as much.

Software companies couldn’t do as much twenty years ago. Each thing mattered more. I blame Meta—mainly because I like to. Also because they built the cult of Move Fast, Break Things. Pair that with massive productivity gains—and here we are.

Good software demands less

The industry knows it’s a problem. Countless meeting hours have debated solutions. Quality efforts spin up—then they spin down. Maybe more process will do it. Or more headcount. Better tools. Just work harder. Care more. AI is going to fix everything, right? Nope. None of them work because they all focus on more. Any solution built on more will fail. The fix is obvious, but unacceptable.

The fix to shrink the haystack. Make the needles seem huge—and matter. The details will be sweated when they matter. I’m not saying process, tools, and whatever can’t help. But not in the haystack. That’s it—that’s how it’s done. Simple, but basically impossible.

Make no mistake—this will not happen. At least not from companies of the Fortune 500 variety. And I expect quality to continue dropping. I do see hope in makers who see this as an opening. There’s real demand for less—and better. Not trillion-dollar-valuation demand. But I do think make-a-decent-living demand exists. And, hey, that may be enough money for enough people.