Friction is good, actually

February 24, 2026 at 2:18 AM (UTC)

I just read another post about someone who's slowly slipping into losing their passion and mourning it and the whole bit.

One of the things they said that stood out to me, riiiiight at the end, was

The web interface of this blog is vibe coded and I have 0 regrets, I’m not into web dev, especially with the trajectory that it has taken. I just want it to look nice and work at an acceptable rate…

So I am, full disclosure, a little into web dev. But mostly not. CSS makes me cry. I sidle away from front-end work whenever I can on a project. Let me dive into those sweet, sweet services.

But it was also not even a question that I'd build this website with my hands firmly on the keyboard, vi-ing until the bovines arrived at their place of residence.

I wanted to build this site for myself, as perfectly as I could.

That was friction, honey. That was me looking up every little piece of the system, figuring out how it was gonna work, analyzing others' public codebases doing similar things, finding random blog posts when I got stuck.

I got sucked right into it and I came out triumphant. Triumphant not just that it was working, but working how I wanted it to, that every line was a Mattie Original™, distilled perfectly.

Sure, I drew some lines I didn't cross. I didn't go and repackage any dependencies or anything. But everything I checked into my own repo, I've been over. It's put together like I wanted it to be put together.

I wouldn't have learned anything if I got it handed to me. It would not have been exactly what I wanted some way or another, I'm sure—even if that way wasn't really visible. I experienced the friction and I was rewarded for it.

It's the same kinda thing I've been doing for many years. I used to have serious issues with so-called "starter kits" but not because I didn't want people to make things or I didn't want them to exist. I even used them as reference material, quite often!

No, it was because they were complicated piles of stuff I didn't want or need in service of the one or two things I did want. What I wanted was to make the journey to a system that was as perfect as I can get it, with only what the system called for–nothing more.

I think there's something to be said for that friction. I think things that I've put that effort into are worth doing. They make me happy. The friction leads to pride, and—I think—justifiably so.