You might’ve heard of the Internet Phone Book, a collection of poetic, interesting, personal websites, and essays about websites, collected by Kristopher and Elliott. We chatted about how the phonebook was made, and about why they’re optimistic about the web that’s made by real people and artists.

TLDR: Make a website, it’ll save your soul.

	Name	Info
P	Piri	The proprietor of this website, and your host
K	Kristoffer Tjalve	Author, artist, organizer of naive yearly
E	Elliott Cost	Author, artist, sees the html.energy all around us

About the Poetic Web

P

You describe the book as a directory for exploring the vast “poetic web”, not the “indie web”, nor the “blogging web”. Why the term poetic web?

Personally, I’m not sure that I’m part of the ‘poetic’ web. I don’t write poetry, but I do want the things I make to be beautiful in a way.

K

Laurel Schwulst started to write that she was interested in the poetic potential for the internet. I believe this inspired Chia Amisola to name the Poetic Web. Now there are more people using it. For me, it’s not that the web has to be poetry. I don’t need to identify a particular grain and substance that these sites all share. Rather I like the term because poetry is less in-your-face, less trying to be right. It’s a bit more like asking questions. A little bit more suggestive. And I find that a way of describing the internet or the web that we engage with.

I also like that the reading of poetry requires a bit more work on the reader’s behalf. You need to kind of make up your own mind of how you interpret poems. If non-fiction leans more towards five-step guides, then poetry is more like the Oracle with arbitrary answers. I’d like that the web is something people feel agency to shape and participate in.

P

So it’s more like poetry is like an art form, which websites can also be.

The internet phone book really reminds me of the original idea of Yahoo as a directory of websites. Hand-curated where some guy was like “oh there’s a new cooking website, better add that in”. Do you think there’s a place for a new Yahoo-style site with trusted links? Maybe as a portal-y destination for people to come back to? Like a wirecutter of websites, if you will.

E

That’s kind of our intention with this book. In many ways we couldn’t take a conventional approach, like what worked in the 90s, when the directory served primarily as a utility. The phonebook speaks to a different time and context. The web is so vast that we can’t and didn’t want to fit it all into a book. Some artists have tried to print the internet, which is interesting, but in many ways we see the phonebook as a community-building project that connects people through printed matter. Starting small, and within the context of where we’ve already been working, felt important.

P

It reminds me of the Famicase exhibitions where artists come together each year to print their own physical Nintendo™ cartridges displayed in a physical place, which brings a lot of artists together.

I’m wondering if most of these websites are fully hand-coded. To be part of the poetic web, is there a requirement that you write the HTML yourself?

E

Not necessarily. I think it’s great when people are hand-coding their sites. There’s something beautiful about that, where you can see the human behind the site through the code or the design. But we want to be open to anyone, and we also included sites made through a web builder, which is fine as well.

K

You’re hearing this from the organizer of HTML Day, which started as free-writing HTML on paper in parks, but I would say, to Elliott’s point, I never got an exclusive feeling, of one type being better than the others. With Elliott and Laurel’s HTML energy it’s just much more about putting your fingerprint on what you do, and I think you can do that with any tool. So it’s more like, can you feel that someone is actually behind this?

P

Can commercial sites ever be a part of the poetic web? In the same way that you have Walmart, but you also have your neighborhood coffee shop, and they have a very different influence on the community.

E

I think it was interesting how the advertisers in the book form their own organic software directory. The ads are a directory of companies that are doing good for the web, respecting people’s privacy, and staying small. They have more sustainable ways of keeping their businesses alive that are less extractive. So yeah, I think there’s definitely a place for commercial sites in the directory, and I think we’ll explore that more. Like, maybe you could have a small inline ad within the directory for people who can’t necessarily afford a full-page ad.

P

Yeah, it’s not like Google where people, mostly bots, bid on adsense and if you win the bidding war your ad is displayed. In contrast to that, you know that to be in the internet phonebook you have to meet a criteria of non-shitty-ness – so there’s a sense of trust in the directory.

K

And also we picked yellow which was originally like the commercial phone book. In many countries you would also have another phone book for residential numbers, in my birth country that was white.. But when you ask people “what color is a phone book?” They say yellow.

Buying ads are… let’s say, optimizing towards some very large companies. I wish there were other ways of finding your customers. And I think as Elliott said, I like your term of organic software. There are a lot of these kinds of companies on the internet, and I would love to help them also establish nice customer relationships. I think those are, like, the mom-and-pop stores of the internet, right?

P

Yeah, it’s one of those things where the companies that need the help don’t have the resources for it, and the big ones that don’t have all the resources for marketing. But you reached out to me, to ask if I’d be interested in sponsoring and I thought that proactive outreach was really cool and helpful.

Producing the Book

P

Before printing the book was there a point where you were like if we don’t get n feedback or reassurance then we won’t do this? Because a print run is an expensive commitment.

K

We emailed potential sponsors to help us front the costs so at least we wouldn’t come up with a loss. And then that was actually really positive. You and other people that we wrote to were like “yeah sure, let’s do this, it sounds fun”. And I also wrote to a few bookshops to check if they would be interested in carrying it and some very nice bookshops said yes. So then we felt like, okay, it’s not gonna be a pile of paper that no one’s gonna look at, I think we can justify printing 500 copies.

P

How did you decide on 500 as a number to print? Did it just feel right, or was there some other consideration?

K

Because we wanted to do offset print, which gives a nicer look and is a nicer reading experience, the minimum order for that to make sense was 500. With printing you have these different levels, where beyond a few thousand it becomes more about the bookbinding than the printing cost because binding has different gluing techniques and the machines need different quantities. Anyways, I like doing physical stuff which has different constraints that are really fascinating.

P

I’ve read a little bit about that from Craig Mod writing about his own membership books that he prints, and yeah, it’s pretty intense.

How successful has the phone book been? Especially compared to your past work?

E

I’d say very successful – it sold out in less than 24 hours after the are.na article. I think we were a bit surprised by that. We would have printed more if we’d known that people really wanted this. So yeah, it’s been surprising, but also lovely.

P

Sounds like the way is paved for future releases. Do you see the phonebook as a yearly periodical? You mentioned in the book itself that a lot of these URLs will be lost to time. Some domains will expire, they’ll be replaced by scam pages and whatnot, so in theory, there is effort required to keep everything up to date.

K

Given the reception and how many people seem excited about it, I think we would love to keep it going and make it a thing for some time. The support has really been crazy, from the people reading, to the bookshops, to, of course, all the people featured in it. I personally find that the book hits all the things that excites us and it’s kind of easier to understand. Like if people ask me, “so what are you doing?”, and I say, “I do internet stuff”, and then they want to understand, now I can just give them this phone book and it kind of explains what it is, and we can talk through that. And it kind of exemplifies a lot of the virtues around what I’m doing, and that feels very exciting, so it would be really cool to keep it going.

I remember Olia Lialina, who also has an essay in the book, posted that the phonebook is kind of like the Whole Earth catalog of our time, which I think is a very sweet reference. It would be incredible to do anything remotely similar in terms of cultural importance. And I think there is something about living around or outside of the big tech company platforms that the phonebook could be a part of.

P

Despite the name, I noticed the book is half traditional phonebook-style listings, and also half essays about the web in general. Do you think you’ll keep that 50-50 balance in future editions?

K

Originally we planned to do this one book, and thought there would be 250 people and their sites in it. And then when we actually opened for submissions, there were like 700~. But then when we put them together in a column layout, we had maybe like 20 pages – which was not enough to look like and feel like a book. That led us to put in essays. But I’m very happy we ended up with that, because the book ended up in all these bookshops, and people have been picking it up who have no familiarity of the part of the internet we’re talking about, so the essays sort of work like a primer to that. So we definitely want to keep having essays in the future.

WWW to IRL

P

How do you see the present and future relationship between the digital and real world evolving?

E

Hmm… personally, I’ve been looking for what I’ve called off-ramps from the web to real-life spaces. I’ve been part of a lot of projects trying to explore this more, like HTML Energy with offline events, where people meet and write HTML together. Friends of ours, Benjamin Earl and Kirsten Spruit, who are part of Extra Practice, the studio I’m in, came up with the term coding in situ. It’s about working on technology that is situated in a physical place and has a sense of locality. I’m not really sure what these explorations will look like in the future, but I do hope that physicality is given more consideration. Think websites that don’t have to be “on” all the time and digital tools designed around physical, local spaces.

P

What advice would you give someone like me, perhaps, who kind of doesn’t live in a cool city. Can they be part of the poetic web, too? It’s a little tough here because you wonder if anyone will show up.

K

You can host your own HTML Day, we’ll help. We were also thinking that we would really like for the book to integrate with these local physical spaces. Like, what are the doors that you can enter in different cities around the world, where you can have conversations with people who are interested in this kind of the internet?

So, like, I think Extra Practice in Rotterdam is such a place, because we know the people there. There are like 5 members and all of them are interested in this. You have Bird Call in Seoul, and of course, these are bigger cities, but it would be nice to integrate everyone with a sort of ‘place directory’ in the phone book as well.

P

And you guys are doing a book tour, which sounds pretty rock and roll. But I don’t know what a book tour is, so what can visitors expect when they come by?

E

It’s kind of based on the space and the organizers there, how they want to run it. So they’ve all been a little different.

K

The Athens one was really nice, there were dear friends, but there were also strangers who came, some lived in New York. They came to get the book as it was sold-out online. So strange how the world works.

E

I see it also as a way of meeting people, having conversations about the web, our hopes and dreams for it and such.

Future Internet

P

Speaking of, are you optimistic or pessimistic overall about the internet’s future?

K

I’m very optimistic. I continuously meet more and more people doing very meaningful things on the web. When I started writing Naive Weekly, which was, I guess was 6 or 7 years ago, I would just write all the same things that everyone else did, often critical stuff about big tech. And then at some point, I was like, okay, I need to stop just criticizing, I need to find out what I really like, and it started a long journey…

Now I keep finding new cool digital publications, or conferences and events related to this. So many people are doing such cool things outside the few big platforms. I find it really very exciting,

E

It also feels like maybe in the last two years, things have shifted a bit, especially with what happened to platforms like Twitter and the people looking for other spaces to be online. But in some ways these other online spaces are all the same, which is a little disheartening. But then I’ve seen a lot of people kind of go deeper and ground themselves in their websites, which has been super inspiring. They were just like, “I’m gonna spend some time just really building out my website, and adding all the features that I want, or that I’ve always dreamed about”. It seems like there’s more mental space for that now.

P

Lately, there seems to be way more people who want to get off social media, but they also feel addicted to it. They’ve identified a problem in their lives, but to fix it they usually try things like setting a timer or something, which to me sounds a bit like “I have a problem with cocaine, so maybe I’ll limit it to 30 minutes a day”.

But I think an actual solution could be … make a website. I’ve found that by just grounding myself more in this blog it kind of takes away my interest in social media. I still post on it, but I don’t really care about the feeds, because I have my own site and other people’s blogs to wander in.

E

It’s definitely better to be addicted to your website than social media. And not everything has to be public too.

K

Social media made it very easy for us to feel like we were staying connected with people, like they’d surface our friends when they have birthdays and stuff like that. But I think that we also forgot some of the important things about being a human, which is to also remember the people we care about and show up for them. Once you start to do your own website and you realize that, oh, people don’t just automatically come there, it’s kind of a good reminder that it takes a little bit of effort to go to other people’s sites and see what they’re doing – like checking in on them.

Also websites have longevity. They’re a longer commitment than a social media post, and I think the pace is more healthy for humans. Like, tending to a website is more aligned with what it means to live a fulfilling life.

At the time of this writing the Internet Phone Book is now back in stock.

Comments…

I could see myself running a hotel. A little world where the architecture is otherworldly. And of course, the service is impeccable – because nothing matters more in any business than how customers are treated.

But while it’s normal for one night in a hotel to cost ~$300, most people expect the price of a month of using pro-grade software – some of which cost millions of dollars to produce and maintain – to be closer to a cup of coffee. That’s because software is inherently a volume business. While I’m busy fixing something, the app is still being used by everyone else. And when I ship improvements, everyone benefits.

Does it make me feel better when Kinopio is more reliable, lighter-weight, simpler, more powerful, and faster? Well, I’ve been happily doing this kind of tuning all month. And honestly, if I could afford to, I’d keep doing it forever.

When it comes to volume, Kinopio is in this awkward puberty phase, where it doesn’t have enough paid users to be completely self-sustainable yet. But I also get bug reports, feature requests, student discount requests, and emails from really nice people telling me how much they love Kinopio, everyday.

So as much as I enjoy improving code, I also know that my primary focus right now really should be on helping new people find Kinopio – and giving them a really inviting first-impression when they do.

Switching my brain from coding-for-computers to writing-for-humans is a violent gesture. It takes a lot of force and focus to pull that rusty mental switch. So when writing mode finally does click on, I’d like to stay there for a while.

But staying away from code gets tricky once daily support requests start rolling in.

People have this perception of a founder or a CEO as someone who floats above the business, separated from the day-to-day so they can think high-level thoughts about high-level things. But especially if you’re building organic software, you’ll be sneaking peeks at the sky, while wading knee-deep through mud. The way I do it, it’s not a glamorous job.

It’s all too easy to over-optimize the support process. With the incantations provided by enterprise help-desk software, you could cast a barrier that only lets people contact you if they’ve searched the docs first. Or you could make them go through an annoying chat bot trained on those docs. And if someone is patient enough to clear the hurdles, you can effortlessly respond with a fully automated reply.

But treating support like a bean-counter really is missing the forest for the trees. One of the major benefits of buying products made by actual people is the expectation of being able easily to reach out to a real person if you need help.

If you’re not beholden to short-sighted investors, and you’re willing to consider the unmeasurable, and act long-term, then support becomes an opportunity to grow a community which changes the relationship between creator and customer from 1:many to many:many.

I don’t know how unique or interesting my approach is, but here are the tools and habits I use to stop support from becoming overwhelming, without compromising quality.

Embrace Contact

The primary purpose of the help site isn’t to reduce support – it’s to have URLs that I can point people to for commonly asked questions. Some people prefer to use the site to look for answers on their own, while others prefer direct contact. Both are okay.

I also have a support forum and a community chat. People will choose whatever you’re comfortable with, but there are good reasons to use one over the others.

Type	Pros	Cons
Email	Everyone knows email, easy to start	Conversations are 1:1 and can’t be shared, hard to keep track of
Chat (Discord)	1:many conversations encourage community and faster responses	Requires a Discord account, old posts are washed away by new ones
Forum (Discourse)	Everything is public, Topics are easier to organize work around, Slower pace	Functional nature isn’t the best for casual community discussions

Making contact easy is just the start of a long road. The shape of a welcoming community, like the shape of a bonsai tree, doesn’t just happen. Without regular care, bonsai fall over and die as their branches crowd each other out for light and nutrients.

Constant Pruning

At least once a day, I check my inbox and read through all the latest updates on the forum and chat. When someone new joins the discord I write them a greeting. Something simple like,

Hi @you, welcome to the Kinopio community chat

I worry that they may think this is just a bot, which I could easily do. But I hand-type it anyways with slight variations to evoke the friendly feeling of being greeted when you walk into a shop or bar – and to show that I, and the other active people here, are listening and want to hear what you have to say.

When you form a community you have a responsibility to actively keep it organized and healthy. When creators and moderators check out of communities, your biggest fans, feeling ignored or betrayed, may become your biggest haters. Passion cuts both ways.

One of the most helpful things that I do to prevent discussions from getting overwhelming is proactively proposing that they be moved elsewhere when it makes sense. Here are some examples of how this plays out IRL:

• Someone emails in a niche feature request that may not be used by anyone else. I would ask them to share their ideas and use-cases in chat to see if others are interested.
• Multiple people email me about the same bug, and others have reported it in chat. I would make a forum topic for the issue, containing all the repro steps and other debug clues, then share the link with everyone so they can track it’s status.
• A non-critical bug is reported in chat that I don’t have the bandwidth to investigate right now (maybe because I’m writing a blog post). So I’ll ask them to post it in the forum so I can get back to it once I have time.
• In chat, everyone’s sharing their hopes and hot-takes on a newly proposed feature. It’s getting spicy. I’d ask the OP to start a forum thread and continue the discussion there so that we don’t lose anyone’s ideas later when I’m ready to work on it.

Although changing communication types comes with friction, it’s also a filter. If the user doesn’t feel like making the effort, then it’s fair to assume that they didn’t feel that strongly about their request.

If you had to choose between chat or a forum, you should choose a forum. But if you have a chat, you need a forum. The slower-pace and more async nature of a forum acts as a blow-off valve that lets the steam escape from heated conversations.

Future Support

As Kinopio grows, will I still be able to do support, and build community like this? The advantage of slower growth is that I have the time to pave the desire paths around the needs of real customers.

I know that customer service isn’t the coolest topic. When costs are being cut it’s usually first on the chopping block. But when the world zigs, my passion zags – because why would you care about something made with the same thinking as everything else?

If you have a problem with your 50 year old vintage Leica, Mercedes, or Tag Heuer, they’ll still service it. Even the most well-made things can break, but treating old customers as well as your new customers is what you do when you’re building a company to last beyond you.

And of course, once it exists, you’re welcome at my hotel anytime.

Comments…

Here lies Glitch, a place on the web you could go to write up a website or a node.js server that would be hosted and updated as you type. 🥀 RIP 2015 – 2025.

I co-created Glitch at Fog Creek Software. I laid out the original product vision for web development with real code that was as easy as editing a Google Doc, designed and built the editor, started the community site, and of course drew the logo and many of the illustrations.

Now seems like the time to look back on just what a unique experience my 6~ years of working at Fog Creek Software and Glitch were, the many mistakes I and others made, and, of course, what I learned and took forward with me after

Working at Fog Creek Software

Fog Creek Software is best known (by those over 40~) for being founded by Joel Spolsky to be the best place for software developers to work, and for being the company that created Trello and StackOverflow.

In 2014, I was recruited by Fog Creek because, despite being a huge fan of Joel’s blog and their bug tracker, Fogbugz, was frustrating to use at work. So, for fun and spite, I did some concept art for how the app might work if it was designed for programmers first and managers second, and posted it to dribbble (another thing only remembered by the 40+). A senior manager saw it and a couple weeks later I was staying at the Ritz in Manhattan to meet the team.

I was hired as a member of technical staff. We all were I think. I worked on Fogbugz a little bit with some of the smartest programmers I’ve ever met; and because we shared the office with Trello, some of the the coolest programmers I’ve ever met too.

But I was primarily hired to help come up with the next big new successful product for the company, which eventually became Glitch.

In 2019, I wrote about how Glitch started and how it evolved over the first four years. It was designed to be beautiful and functional, in its own unique way.

Promising Early Days

I always thought of Glitch as web development without the
$ git how-do-I-stage-and-commit-updates-again?, and the
$ heroku push-how-come-this-only-works-on-my-own-computer-wtf tango 💃. Of course, these are both powerful and necessary tools for experienced programmers and large projects, but what if these were optional instead of required?

The real innovation of Glitch was in its belief in a new “middle-market” of developers that wanted the creative power and copy-paste-ability that you only get with real coding – but with the ease-of-use of the normal consumer software they were used to.

Why does creating a new web app have to be harder than creating a new google doc? To the user, they’re both just boxes you type into.

When Glitch launched it was really well received, with write-ups in The Verge, TechCrunch, and the other big publications of the day.

People used Glitch in schools, to build games and apps to share with their friends, and even to learn new skills in jail. According to the Fog Creek veterans who were working at Trello and SO, the electricity in the air was just like when those products launched.

Some experienced programmers critiqued the editor for being too simple for serious work. This was really encouraging because at the time we wanted to follow in the footsteps of Ruby on Rails: initially used by hobbyists for fun → dismissed as a toy by serious coders → right up until it becomes the status quo enterprise choice.

We had the toy-like, easy-to-use, and approachable first part down. But to walk the rest, we discussed and wrote specs so that one day you could do things like:

• Safely work on collaborative projects in your own branch.
• Backup and control deploys by syncing projects with Github repos.
• Edit how you want by syncing projects to your local text editor or filesystem.

Alas, these were not to be. Nothing was ever directly said, but after leadership cemented it’s focus on learning and hobbyists, there was never the time or the resources to seriously iterate on the hard parts of that vision.

Easy and Friendly Are the Trees, Not the Forest

Coincidentally, this was right around the time Glitch received $30m in VC funding. My understanding is that the pitch was basically “Youtube but for web apps”. The new vision was that web apps were going to be a new kind of entertainment medium that would be virally shared. And just like Youtube, there are way more watchers than creators, so discovery and community features would be the new core of the experience.

Despite my protests, the size of the team was doubled every year. The new employees were fans of the new vision and more excited about Glitch as a learning and beginner platform. There were now two frontend teams: the Community team which was a team of 10-20. And the Editor team – which was just me.

The editor had a lot of technical debt that made it intimidating to work on, but it was frustrating that new development projects were almost always easier greenfield tasks like redesigning the 404 page, or adding the ability to save apps to lists – there didn’t seem to be much interest from leadership in improving the developer experience. (After I left there was a full rewrite of the editor, but I found it … not good).

Middle-market product positioning is hard. You need power users creating inspiring projects and recommending it, so the tooling can’t be half assed. You need to be able to engage new users with a fun experience and create social or collaborative loops that keep them coming back. This balance takes a clear vision, a lot of time – and a lot of luck – to nail.

I do believe that Glitch could have benefited from VC funding after we found that balance – but taking that much money before even having paid customers still feels like a mistake.

Learning from Failure

If you’re really deep in the Fog Creek lore, you might also know that the company had a long history of releasing products that were ahead of their time, but not positioned quite right, or stewarded in the wrong direction:

Released	Product	Description	Released Before
2000	Fogbugz	Bug Tracker	Jira, 2002
2001	CityDesk	Website CMS	Wordpress, 2003
2005	Copilot	Screen-sharing and KVM	Zoom, 2013
2010	Kiln	Git hosting	Github, 2008

I put the release year first to emphasize how pioneering most of these were. It’s hard to know what to build when you’re early.

I still believe there’s a market for easy and fun web development and hosting, but a product like this needs power-users and enthusiasts willing to pay for it. To build any kind of prosumer software, you do have to be an optimist and believe that enough of the world still cares about quality and craft.

Ultimately I’ve learned a lot more from my failures, of which there are many, than my successes. I learned that I value clear and unambiguous communication above flowery narratives that change on a whim. And I learned that what I find admirable in a leader is someone who can simply say what they’ll do, and do what they say. And if it turns out they can’t, that’s okay because they’ll tell you why.

It’s been 6 years since I worked on Glitch and I don’t really have any strong feelings about it anymore. I just feel really grateful to everyone who created something cool with it over the years.

Special thanks to Aneesha for helping edit this

Comments…

At the dawn of the industry, we needed big companies to deliver quality software. You’d buy version 1.0 because the way it worked was revolutionary, and it let you do amazing new things. You’d buy version 2.0 because it added helpful new features. Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, etc. became household names because software was hard to make, and even harder to box up and get on store shelves.

But by the time version 10~ or so releases, the product includes basically every feature possible. It’s all things to all people.

So how do you make version 11 compelling? The answer turned out to be Lol who cares now. Once you have monopoly market share, the product (and the people that made it) are largely irrelevant. What now keeps the almighty profit line going up and to the right 📈 is sales and marketing – and predictably the relationship between user and tool metamorphoses from symbiotic to parasitic.

The old monopolies aren’t going anywhere. But a new era of tools designed for a different fate are sprouting up out of old, analogue ideas like creativity, purposefulness, human-made craftsmanship.

Domino’s – the Microsoft of pizza – also isn’t going anywhere. But for those who know, and those who care, there’s always a way better neighborhood spot.

Chasing Good Friction

I spend a lot of time thinking about tools for thinking and creativity, and how they’ve changed. If you’re not used to drawing or writing – and even if you are – the scariest thing in the world is a blank page.

The first sentence, or the first brush stroke, is a high anxiety situation. Full of potential, full of unknown pain.

So to help with the blank slate problem, software tools added Templates. File → New turned into File → New → Do You Want to Make a Portfolio? Or a Résumé?. This more recently turned into File → New → Ask AI to Do It. These features help some people, but also create new problems.

These tools can generate almost effortless outputs. They unburden us from the abrasion of creativity and their generic-by-design results keep us cocooned from the risks of standing out. No one wants to make ‘ugly’ art, or a ‘bad’ website. But struggling and making mistakes is an important part of developing skills and – increasingly important – finding your own voice.

We don’t talk enough about the many-years-long rite of passage that every creator goes through.

Everyone can draw or write, but only the smallest sliver will decide that they want to earnestly make things to share with other people.

At whatever age it grips you though, the urge to create pulls you into a world of frustration, where your skills don’t yet match your taste and everything you try feels not good enough. Unfortunately, the first step to being good at something is to suck at it.

But the expedition is especially dispiriting when your tools constantly wink at you to generate ‘perfect’ results instantly.

Why did I spend two+ painful weeks writing a blog post?

For the Journey

I don’t write very often, so I’m not sure if my pace is glacial or merely tortoise-like. Then again Tolkien took 12+ years to write The Lord of the Rings.

Speaking for myself, even after I plan things out, the shape of an essay (sometimes even my whole argument) changes as I write.

I type with two IA Writer text editor windows open. One for the post, and one where I throw rejected or tangential paragraphs and ideas that don’t quite fit. So far, each file contains ~2000 words… implying that I throw away ~half of what I type.

From a short-term-results point of view, this process may seem inefficient, painful, and somewhat savage. I wouldn’t really disagree – but, like working out, or eating well, the sweat and tears are worth it in the long-term because I solidify my ideas with every new post I write.

Even after all that work, it’s never as good as I want to be – especially considering the effort. I’m still always a little bit embarrassed to share my work, because it’s never ‘perfect’.

But it’s better than perfect, it’s imperfect.

Struggling is an important part of developing skills and finding your own voice, and having an audience that’s watched your work evolve over years is a slept on privilege.

The Human-Tools Era

When you’re excited about a new hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the case of LLMs, just a year or two ago investors couldn’t catapult money fast enough at anyone incanting the magic letters A and I. Now that the dust is settling, I suspect we’ll look back at AI as something that was good(ish) at summarizing text and image recognition – but was used to make everything in the world harder to understand, less fun, and worse.

More so now than ever before, making something yourself that you fully understand is deeply empowering. As the world gets noisier, glossier, and more fake, the more valuable the human-touch becomes in both the real world and on the real web.

LLMs are the new normal. “Easy to use” became “let me tell you what to write and how to draw”, “here’s what you’ll watch next”, and “here’s what you believe”.

But there is always be a market for understandable, engaging, and fun-to-use tools.

What Most People Use	What Enthusiasts Use
Phone camera	Dedicated camera
Whatever pen is nearby	Fountain pen
The keyboard that came with your computer	Mechanical Keyboard
Coors Light™	Craft brew
Smart watch	Non-smart watch
Fast fashion	hand-made knitwear

In your heart, you probably can’t be an enthusiast for everything. I like cool cameras, I don’t care about wine (TBH I’ll happily drink Coors Light™), and obviously I care about good software. Let me add a row:

What Most People Use	What Enthusiasts Use
Software that generates quick results for you	Software that gives you the time, space, and encouragement to do your best work

When it comes to thinking through problems, working through projects, or expressing yourself, special tools aren’t a necessity – but they can make the journey a lot more fun.

Doing things a little differently makes the results more imperfect and personal. Being authentically you is what makes the journey worthwhile.

Special thanks to Aneesha and Ben for helping edit this.

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