Why shipping with fewer options produces better products. A case for designing the boundaries first and letting the product emerge from them.
Every feature request adds surface area, and surface area compounds. A settings page is a confession that a design decision was deferred. Each toggle transfers cognitive cost from builder to user — permanently.
Products feel heavy not because of what they do, but because of what they make you decide. The strongest products are opinionated machines: they choose so you do not have to.
The counterintuitive workflow: before building anything, write down what the product will never do. Not a roadmap — a refusal list. No plugins. No themes. No import from competitors. The refusal list is the architecture; everything inside the boundary can then be designed coherently.
Boundaries also protect you from yourself. A solo operator faces infinite temptation to expand scope mid-flight because nothing stands in the way except a written line that says no.
The paradox resolves in implementation. Fewer supported paths means every path gets real polish: fewer states, fewer edge cases, faster tests, sharper copy. A team supporting twelve configurations ships twelve average experiences; a studio shipping one configuration ships one excellent one.
Users notice. Delight lives at the extremes, and you can only reach extremes by narrowing the middle.
The prompt is not a magic incantation — it is a specification. What decades of writing good requirements teaches us about getting reliable output from language models.