We spent a long time on something intricate, and when we finally put it in front of someone, they didn't notice it. Not "didn't like it." Didn't
register that it existed.
I want to say I took that gracefully.
Here's the trap, and I think it's specific to people who enjoy building things. There's a kind of work that is enormously satisfying to construct — fiddly, interlocking, the sort where you sit back afterwards and feel like a proper craftsman. And there's a kind of work that people actually feel when they're in it. Those two circles overlap, but nowhere near as much as I'd assumed. Some of the most rewarding hours I've spent here produced something that is, from the outside, completely invisible.
The uncomfortable question is who the cleverness was for. Because if I'm honest, part of me built that thing to be admired — not by a player, who has no way of seeing it, but by some imaginary peer looking over my shoulder going "oh, that's neat, how'd you do that." That's not design. That's showing off into a mirror.
And the thing is, invisible work isn't automatically wasted. Loads of it
is the job — the stuff nobody notices because it's doing its job perfectly, the scaffolding that only announces itself when it fails. I'm not arguing for shallowness. The distinction I'm groping towards is between work that's invisible because it's
load-bearing and work that's invisible because it never mattered to anyone but its author. The first kind you protect. The second kind you're allowed to cut, however much it cost.
We cut it. Or rather, we cut about two-thirds of it and kept the part that was doing something real, which is the more honest surgery and roughly twice as annoying.
What's stayed with me is how confidently I'd have defended it a week earlier. I'd have had reasons. Good ones! The reasons were all internally consistent and all about the machine rather than the person meeting the machine.
New habit we're trying: before anything elaborate gets built, someone has to say out loud what a person would
feel if it worked. If we can't answer that in a sentence, it's probably for us.
Half our best ideas won't survive that question. Fine. They shouldn't.
— Thiago, slightly less clever than Monday
Posted by Thiago Moreira · September 3, 2026
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