Enhance, then disappear
Software as a quiet competence — built to do its job and get out of the way. No streaks, no engagement loops, no asking to be remembered.
The defining feature of most software shipped in the last decade isn’t what it does — it’s how loudly it asks to be reopened. Streaks, badges, weekly digests, push notifications about push notifications, the whole grammar of the attention economy stitched into things that used to be tools.
We’re trying to build the other thing. Software that adds something to your day and then steps back. No nudges that exist for engagement metrics. No asking for permission to send notifications about something you didn’t sign up for. No dark patterns dressed up as features. The highest praise a tool we built can get is I forgot it was running — it just worked.
This isn’t a moral position so much as a taste one. Quiet software is harder to ship — it has fewer hooks, fewer charts go up and to the right, no growth team to lean on. But it ages better. People come back to it on their own, because they remembered it was good, not because a notification yanked them back in.
What this looks like in practice
Placeholder — be concrete: notification defaults, what we’ll never ask permission to do, the metrics we refuse to optimise for, the dark patterns we’ve turned down work over.