Slow Software

There is a category of software that is fast in the benchmark sense and slow in the human sense. It renders in twelve milliseconds and still wastes an hour of your afternoon.

The waste comes from a different place than performance. It comes from software that does not know what it is for. Every unnecessary choice is a small tax. Every configuration screen with forty toggles is an admission that no one was willing to decide. The user is handed the design work that the designers avoided.

Slow software also tends to be talkative. It announces things. It asks whether you are sure. It celebrates your streaks. Each of these interruptions is defensible on its own and ruinous in aggregate, because attention does not come back the moment the modal closes.

The tools I keep for years have a common shape. They start instantly. They do one thing without commentary. They store their data somewhere I can find it. They are almost never the most capable option, and that is precisely why they survive.

I think the underlying rule is that software should aim to be forgettable. Not invisible in the design-award sense, just genuinely uneventful. You want to remember the thing you made, not the tool you made it with. Anything the tool does to be memorable is usually done at your expense.