I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
There's this unspoken assumption in the dev community that a tool needs to be technically impressive to be worth building. Like, if you can't explain the architecture in a way that gets nods at a conference, it doesn't really count.
And then there's the other extreme—the AI slop wave. Products that seem sophisticated but solve nothing. Demos that work great until you actually try to use them.
Both of these things make me tired in the same way.
The stuff I actually reach for every day isn't clever. It's just... there when I need it. Does one thing. Gets out of the way.
I think a lot of builders (myself included, for a while) conflate "hard to build" with "valuable." But users don't care about the insides. They care whether the 15 minutes of friction is gone.
That's kind of become my personal filter when I'm evaluating ideas now: is there a real person who has this annoyance, and does fixing it actually free up something for them? Not "is this technically interesting." Not "is this AI-powered." Just—does it help.
Curious if others think about it this way. Especially when you're building smaller, focused tools—how do you justify the simplicity to yourself (or to others)?
Top comments (1)
On DEV, there is a lot of articles where they over complicate a specific topic or have too much content to read to the point where it is overwhelming for me.
I tend to look for articles that are "easy" to read, but also the project that is really impressive. All articles are created uniquely and it all comes down to writing whether it connects to the reader or not. I feel like now, articles are generated with AI with terminologies that I do not understand and seeing a lot of fluff where it can be reduce down to one paragraph. I do agree that a tool needs to be helpful, but it's not a bad idea to share something random on DEV. It's a small community after all and everyone here is really supportive.
Not everyone here is "AI". I am not AI lol, but I do get where you are coming from where AI is everyone and it is difficult to determine what to look for.
Thanks Marvson!