Order grows
from small things.

Big problems get software.
Small frictions don’t.

Software has always been expensive, so it only got written when enough people shared the same problem. Big problems got big software; the small, odd frictions around each of us got nothing. A QR code in a web image still means reaching for your phone. An agent finishes its work and nobody tells you. A tool breaks and nobody fixes it. We absorb these ourselves, or get squeezed into templates that don’t fit. Entropy isn’t at the end of the universe. It’s in the attention we lose to these every day.

Now software is cheap enough
to write for one small thing.

AI didn’t change what good software is. It changed the cost. One person with AI can build something usable for one specific situation in a weekend, even if only a few hundred people need it. What wasn’t worth doing is worth doing now.

One situation,
one small piece of software.

We call this kind of software a micro-element. It isn’t a do-everything platform and it doesn’t squeeze you into a template. It gets one thing right, then steps back. Micro-elements stand alone, and they combine: people can use them, and so can the agents working for them.

Order isn’t designed.
It grows.

The pattern behind this text has no blueprint. Each point does two simple things: it reacts with its neighbours, and it spreads. Put thousands together and spots, mazes and coral appear. We think order in the world arrives the same way: not from one grand plan, but from many people each getting one small thing right.

A live Gray-Scott reaction–diffusion model, after Alan Turing’s 1952 paper “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis”.

Noise got cheap too.

Making things is easy now; a half-finished one costs almost nothing. So we hold ourselves to three rules.

1. Finishing beats making. It counts once it’s released and someone else can really use it.
2. Quiet beats loud. No nagging, no streaks, no touching data it has no business with.
3. Open beats owned. Usable by people and by their agents; take it and keep building.

What small friction
do you live with?

Write it down and watch it grow into structure here. If you like, post it: the next micro-element might be written for it.

A small friction in your day Grow it

What you type stays on this page. Nothing is stored.

Too many small frictions
for one person.

Don’t just watch. Name a friction, take a micro-element, or write one of your own with AI. Everyone who does is making the world a little more ordered.