Whimsy is free now

The tradeoff we all made

Every project I’ve ever worked on involved the same calculation: ship or polish. You could have one or the other, but rarely both, because time is finite and features are what actually ship.

Interactive toggles * "add a toggle where turning one on knocks the other off" 0:22 for a blog post? Save it for when you have spare time. Interactive components that respond to the reader? Maybe on the marketing site where it actually matters. Little delightful touches that make people smile for half a second? Add it to the backlog and never look at it again.

It was less about laziness and more about resource allocation. Every hour spent on polish was an hour that could have gone toward something that moved the needle. And in a world where building anything took real effort and VCs were breathing down your neck, you had to be ruthless about what deserved that effort.

So we shipped utilitarian things that worked, that got the job done and nothing more, because the alternative was shipping nothing at all.

What I’ve been doing lately

I’ve been writing blog posts with Claude Code over the past few weeks, and the last two have custom components that I never would have built on my own.

The post about rebuilding my website via Telegram has fake iMessage-style bubbles that animate in as you scroll through the conversation. They look like the actual texts I sent to Clawdbot, complete with the little delivery animations and proper spacing. I described what I wanted while wrangling a toddler, and twenty minutes later they existed.

The post about the 1000 commits problem has bugs crawling around the viewport and a commit counter that flies through numbers so fast you can barely read them. I told Claude I wanted the page to feel a little chaotic, like things were moving faster than you could keep track of, and it understood exactly what I meant.

I spent zero seconds writing CSS keyframes, debugging z-index issues, or figuring out why the positioning was janky on Safari. * "make sure this works on Safari too" 0:48 I didn’t spend an afternoon referencing the docs for an animation library. I described a vibe and moved on with my life.

These components exist because the effort required to create them collapsed to almost nothing.

The math is different now

When polish takes ten hours, you skip it. When polish takes ten minutes, the question becomes: why wouldn’t you?

This is the part that I keep coming back to. The conversation around AI-assisted development has mostly been about speed, about shipping faster, about doing more with less. And that’s true, but it misses something important about what happens when effort costs drop this dramatically.

The things that were previously “nice to have” start becoming “why not.” The threshold for what’s worth building shifts, and suddenly you’re building things you never would have considered before. A dynamic animation * "make the timer count down with motion blur" 0:24 that breathes life into a static number. A custom illustration. An easter egg that maybe three people will find. These used to be luxuries reserved for teams with dedicated designers and time to burn.

I have two kids under five, a full-time job, and a local band with low-paying gigs. My free time barely exists. There is just no world in which I could spend an evening writing animation code for a blog post that maybe a few hundred people will read. But I’ll spend thirty seconds describing what I want and let Claude figure out the implementation while I do something else.

The backlog graveyard

Remember all those ideas that weren’t worth the effort? The features you sketched out but never built because the implementation time couldn’t justify the payoff?

Here’s what a few hours of “not worth it” looks like now:

Each of these cards does exactly what it describes. Hover over them. Click the confetti one. Watch the parallax layers move. All working implementations that took seconds to describe.

The strikethrough on each card is the old estimate. The reality underneath is the new math.

The post you’re reading right now

I keep thinking about Josh Comeau while writing this. He’s built a reputation on handcrafted details—custom visualizations, interactive explanations, details that clearly took days to perfect. That level of care became his signature.

And now here I am, describing what I want and watching it appear. The gap between “I put in the work” and “I described the vibe” is collapsing, and I’m not sure how to feel about that.

There’s something lost when effort stops being a signal . When anyone can have whimsy, the people who earned it through craft don’t stand out the same way. The scarcity that made their work special is disappearing.

Taste still matters—maybe more than before. Knowing what to build becomes the skill when how to build it stops being a blocker. But I’d be lying if I said this doesn’t feel a little like showing up to a marathon in a car.

What this actually means

The costs are real. Tailwind had to lay off 75% of their engineering team. The framework has more traction than ever, but AI tools know it so well that nobody visits the docs anymore. Revenue down, team gutted, even though every AI-generated project seems to pick Tailwind by default.

The things we built careers on—deep expertise, craft, knowing how to do the hard stuff—matter less when the hard stuff isn’t hard anymore.

And yet.

The playing field is leveling in ways I didn’t expect. The blog posts that stand out, the documentation that some people still actually enjoy reading, the product experiences that feel like someone gave a shit—these used to require resources most people didn’t have. Now the barrier is just caring enough to ask for it.

When everyone can build anything, taste becomes the thing that matters * "make this phrase stand out somehow" 0:02 . Knowing what’s worth adding, deciding when to stop, and understanding the difference between delightful and cluttered.

For fifteen years, I made the rational choice to skip the details that didn’t move the needle. The math made sense. But the math has changed, and I’m still figuring out what that means for how I build things.

Whimsy is free now. I’m trying to remember to use it.