AI Fatigue? I Counted: 9 of the Last 10 Articles I Opened Were About AI. So I Wrote About a Button Instead.

When did every article on the internet become about AI?

Last night, in my hostel room, with a cup of tea going cold beside me, I counted: 9 of the last 10 articles I had opened had AI in the title.

So today there is no AI in this post, starting now. There is a button. We are going to understand the button completely, and it is going to feel great.

First, the count (because feelings are not data)

I scrolled my own reading history like a detective investigating himself. The last ten articles I had genuinely opened — not skimmed past, opened:

• AI agents doing a job
• AI tools ranked
• AI replacing a profession
• AI, but for a different profession
• One article about databases (thank you, whoever you are)
• AI workflows
• Prompting, framed three different ways
• AI again

9 out of 10. I did not go looking for this. I follow normal topics: web development, programming, learning to code. The AI arrived on its own, the way rain arrives.

It's not that the articles are bad

Let me be fair before I am tired. Some of those nine were good. I learned things from at least three of them. I use AI tools myself, most days, and I wrote a whole post recently about pasting AI answers into my class group chat, so I am hardly innocent here.

The tiredness is simpler than anger. It is the feeling of opening a fridge and finding nine bottles of the same drink. Fine drink. Still.

Everything I opened promised to change how I work. Nothing I opened asked me to finish one small thing and understand it fully. So I closed all the tabs and picked the smallest complete thing in web development I could think of.

A button.

Anyway. The button.

Here is a button, in its everyday state:

button {
  font: inherit;
  padding: 0.6rem 1.2rem;
  border: none;
  border-radius: 8px;
  background: #2563eb;
  color: white;
  cursor: pointer;
}

Plain English: font: inherit stops the button from using its own stubborn default font and makes it wear the page's font like everyone else; the rest is a blue rectangle with soft corners that admits, via the pointer cursor, that it can be clicked.

Now the button when a mouse hovers over it:

button:hover {
  background: #1d4ed8;
}

Plain English: the colour deepens slightly, which is the button's way of saying "yes, I saw your mouse, I am awake" — the cheapest conversation in all of web design.

Now the state most tutorials skip, and the one that matters to anyone who navigates with a keyboard:

button:focus-visible {
  outline: 3px solid #93c5fd;
  outline-offset: 2px;
}

Plain English: when someone tabs onto this button, a visible ring appears around it; :focus-visible is polite enough to show the ring for keyboard users without flashing it at mouse users who don't need it.

And the button on its day off, when it cannot be used:

button:disabled {
  opacity: 0.5;
  cursor: not-allowed;
}

Plain English: a faded button with a "no" cursor is honest design — it tells you the action exists but is not available right now, instead of letting you click into nothing.

The catch: this changed nothing

Nobody will share this post for the button. The button will not trend. It solves no industry problem, and I knew all of that before I wrote a line of it.

But here is what did happen. I finished it. In about 25 minutes, I went from a blank file to four states of one element, and there is not a single line in it I cannot explain to you out loud. That has become a rarer feeling in my learning than I want to admit. Most days I consume ten big ideas and retain a summary of a summary. Today I own one button, outright, free and clear 🙃

Small things finished beat big things half-understood. That is the whole sermon. It fits in one line because it is a small sermon, about a small button.

Your turn

When did you last finish something tiny and understand every line of it?
What was it?
One line is enough — I will read every one.