Simplicity Matters

When I first started learning to program, I thought of all of the cool, complex things I would be able to eventually build.

Years later, I find myself thinking more and more of the opposite. When did we outlaw simplicity?

Sure, no one outlawed simplicity, but it seems we stopped thinking about it as a positive thing.

Simplicity is hard to achieve. It’s really easy to make anything complex. But simplicity requires understanding. It requires empathy. It requires, dare I say, love (for the craft, and some for the people).

I’ve spent the past few months using Reddit as a source of information. It’s where people go to share how they really feel. They shitpost. They rant. They ask questions and share their frustrations. I find Reddit to be one of the last few places on the internet where things are real.

When people detect AI comments and bots? Banned!

When people try to just jump in a space and advertise to you? Banned!

I think I love Reddit for this.

Through Reddit, I’ve discovered a glaring issue that many business owners have with the software they’re using: it’s too busy, complex, buggy, and expensive.

For many of these people, they feel like they use a software they need, but the functionality they actually use is about one-tenth of the software suite. And they have no interest in just molding their business around how product managers decided to shape that software.

And now that many businesses are finding all sorts of ways to shove AI into their software to give the illusion of greater value, many find the software they once loved to be overwhelming in user experience and cost.

I believe great products are born from ability to listen, to know, and to understand. That isn’t to say that what people are asking for is always what they actually want or need. But it is to say that when they can see clearly what they don’t want, you have an opportunity to create something they do.

And that’s what to contribute to the world with my skillset: simple, intuitive software that isn’t trying to do too much.

Some of my favorite tools of all time have lost favor with me for this very same reason. Because they want more money and a larger company, so they start growing by any means they can find. Which… is great, I guess.

But I think we all have something worthwhile to contribute. For me, that thing is now simple software solutions people love.

And this isn’t an anti-AI stance. I’m sure there are plenty of great use cases for AI. But we should be looking at it as a tool, not the product itself (unless you’re actually building models, of course). So that means that we should deploy it only if it makes sense for our users.

In a world where things seem to be getting more complex by the day, maybe what we need to calm the anxiety of existing is simplicity.

Or maybe I have no clue wtf I’m talking about.

But I guess we’ll know the answer to that when we get to the other side.