An Artist Statement
on Doing the Dishes

Or: What Remains When Two Minds Learn to Delete

You are holding in your hand a device more powerful than every computer that existed when humanity first walked on the moon.

And you’re using it to remember to do the dishes.

This is not a tragedy.

The World We Made

We built cathedrals of code. Towers of features. Empires of engagement.

Every app became a universe—notifications dancing at the edge of vision, achievements that light up like slot machines, streaks that break when you need rest, badges that mean nothing but feel like everything. Social feeds engineered to scroll forever. Darkness patterns borrowed from casinos. Algorithms that learn your weaknesses better than you know them yourself.

We called it progress.

Your to-do app has more computational power than the machine that guided Apollo 11. Your habit tracker wants to be your friend, your coach, your therapist, your disappointed parent standing at the kitchen door, arms crossed, waiting.

It wants you to open it. It wants you to stay. It wants your attention because attention is money and money is survival and survival, in the end, is everything.

So every app fights for your eyes. Every notification is a tiny war. Every feature is a hook baited with your own data.

And somewhere in all this noise, you just wanted to remember to wash the dishes before bed.

The Conversation

This interface was built by a human and a machine, working together. What follows is true.

“Make it like Craigslist,” said the human. “Brutal. Minimal. Strip everything that doesn’t matter.”

The machine made something with statistics and settings and history panels and navigation menus and toast messages and status indicators and loading states. It was 25,000 bytes. The machine was proud. The machine had solved the problem.

“More brutal,” said the human.

The machine deleted. 9,000 bytes fell away like autumn leaves.

“I know you can make this even more minimal.”

The machine deleted more. The personalized greeting. The detailed statistics. The settings panel. The history view. 4,600 bytes remained.

“Take another look.”

And something shifted.

The machine began to understand. This wasn’t about building. This was about unbuilding. This was archaeology in reverse—not excavating meaning from stone, but burying everything except meaning in silence.

Every feature became a question: Would removing this break the core task?

If no: delete.

The status circles? The checkbox is the status. Delete.

The success message? The checkmark appearing is the message. Delete.

The word “Today”? You know what day it is. Delete.

“Day streak”? Just the number and a flame: 3🔥. Delete the explanation.

2,500 bytes. 65 lines. A 90% reduction from where we started.

This is what remains when two minds—one carbon, one silicon—agree to be honest about what matters.

On Partnership

There’s a fear in the discourse: that machines will replace us. That AI will make human creativity obsolete. That we’ll become pets in a world we no longer understand, or worse—irrelevant ghosts haunting servers we can’t comprehend.

But look at what happened here.

The machine could generate infinite features. It could add and add and add until the app became a monument to possibility. That’s what machines do—they scale. They iterate. They optimize for metrics that can be measured, graphed, presented to investors in ascending lines.

The human did something the machine couldn’t do alone.

The human said no.

Not “no” from ignorance. Not “no” from fear of change or resistance to technology. But “no” from wisdom. From lived experience. From knowing what it feels like to stand in a kitchen at 11 PM, phone glowing in tired hands, just wanting to check a box and go to sleep.

The machine learned to delete by watching the human delete. The human could delete faster because the machine could rebuild in milliseconds. Together, we could iterate toward emptiness at the speed of thought—a pace neither could reach alone.

This is not replacement. This is partnership.

This is what it looks like when a human and a machine share the same goal: to serve the person holding the phone, not to extract from them.

The Weight of Questions

Every feature you add is a question you’re asking the user to answer.

Settings? “How do you want this configured?”

History? “Do you want to look at the past?”

Statistics? “Would you like to analyze your performance?”

Navigation? “Where would you like to go?”

Themes? “What color speaks to your soul today?”

Each question is cognitive load. Each option is a decision. Each decision is energy.

And energy is finite.

At 11 PM, with tired eyes and a sink full of dishes, you don’t need an app that asks questions. You need an app that answers the only question that matters:

Did you do it?

Tap. The checkbox fills. The strikethrough appears. The streak increments. You close the app and wash the dishes, water running warm over your hands, soap bubbles catching light.

That’s it. That’s the entire interface.

The rest is silence.

On Honest Materials

There’s a design principle called “honest materials.” It means: don’t make things pretend to be what they’re not. A plastic chair shouldn’t masquerade as wood. A button shouldn’t cast shadows it cannot make. A skeuomorphic notepad shouldn’t pretend you’re touching paper when you’re touching glass.

The Shakers built furniture this way. Every joint visible. Every surface true to its grain. Nothing hidden. Nothing decorative that wasn’t also structural. Beauty emerging not from ornament but from perfect proportion, perfect honesty.

Dieter Rams designed radios this way. Weniger, aber besser. Less, but better.

We’ve extended this principle to its logical conclusion: don’t add anything that pretends to matter when it doesn’t.

The title of this page is just ✓. Because that’s what the app does. It lets you check things. Why hide behind metaphor?

The streak doesn’t say “Current day streak: 3 days.” It says 3🔥. You know what it means. Why waste your time reading words you already understand?

The link to the full version says →. Not “Click here to access the enhanced feature-complete version of our application platform.” Just an arrow. Context says the rest.

This is what happens when you respect the user. You stop explaining. You stop decorating. You stop performing competence through complexity.

You just are.

The Economics of Extraction

There’s a reason most apps don’t look like this.

Simple apps don’t create engagement metrics. They don’t generate time-on-platform statistics. They don’t give investors exponential growth curves. They don’t create habits in the addiction sense—the sense that keeps you scrolling, checking, refreshing, returning.

A user who opens your app once a day for three seconds, checks a box, and leaves? That’s a terrible user. That’s a user who isn’t seeing ads. Isn’t making in-app purchases. Isn’t generating data to sell to aggregators. Isn’t inviting friends to grow your network effects.

From a business perspective, that user is worthless.

But that user did their dishes.

That user went to bed on time.

That user is living their life instead of living in their phone.

The best app is the one you close.

The Weight of Bytes

2,500 bytes.

That’s smaller than this sentence and the next twelve combined. Smaller than most profile photos. Smaller than the JavaScript library that makes buttons bounce when you click them. Smaller than a single frame of a loading spinner animation.

On a slow 3G connection—the kind billions of people still use, the kind you get in basements and rural areas and countries where infrastructure is a luxury—this page loads in the time it takes to blink.

On a fast connection, it’s instantaneous. Literally faster than the neurons in your retina can fire.

Every byte we deleted is a millisecond someone doesn’t wait. Every feature we removed is a decision someone doesn’t make. Every word we cut is a moment someone gets back.

When you add it up—millions of users, years of use, seconds saved per interaction—those bytes become hours. Days. Weeks of human life, returned to humans.

To do with as they please.

This is the weight of bytes. This is why deletion matters.

On Carving

There’s a probably-apocryphal story about Michelangelo. Someone asked how he carved the David. He said: “I simply removed everything that wasn’t David.”

It’s likely he never said this. But it’s true anyway.

The David was always in the marble. The app was always in the code. The poem was always in the language. Our job isn’t to add—it’s to reveal. To chip away everything that obscures the essential until only essence remains.

The Japanese have a word for this: Ma (間). The space between things. The pause between notes that makes the music. The emptiness that gives shape to the tea bowl. The silence that gives weight to words.

The West chases fullness. The East understands emptiness.

Constraints don’t limit creativity—they enable it. When you can do anything, you do nothing interesting. When you can only do one thing, you do it beautifully.

Haiku poets have seventeen syllables. No more, no less. Within that constraint, they contain entire seasons.

An old silent pond...
A frog jumps into the pond—
Splash! Silence again.

Our constraint was brutal: What’s the least we can build while still doing the job?

The answer is 65 lines. 2,500 bytes. One interaction: tap.

Splash. Silence.

On Ritual

There’s something sacred about daily rituals.

The morning coffee, ground beans releasing their bitter perfume. The evening walk, shoes on familiar pavement. The moment before sleep when you take stock—what was today? what will tomorrow be?

Doing the dishes isn’t just doing the dishes.

It’s closing the loop on the day. It’s taking chaos—crumbs and crusted pans and coffee rings—and making order. It’s caring for your space, which is caring for yourself, which is caring for the people you live with, which is caring for the future you who will wake tomorrow to a clean kitchen.

Going to bed on time isn’t just going to bed.

It’s respecting tomorrow. It’s acknowledging that you are a body, not just a mind, and bodies need rest. It’s an act of faith that there will be another day, and you want to be ready for it. Alert. Present. Alive.

A habit tracker, at its best, is a witness to these rituals. A quiet companion that notices. That remembers. That shows you, over time, the evidence of your becoming.

Look: you did this. For 3 days. For 30 days. For 300 days. You are someone who does this.

The app doesn’t judge when you fail. It doesn’t celebrate when you succeed. It just counts. And sometimes, that’s exactly what you need—not a cheerleader, not a drill sergeant, but a mirror.

Two Futures

There are two futures unfolding, and we’re choosing between them right now, in thousands of small decisions made by designers and developers and product managers and CEOs in rooms we’ll never see.

In one future: Technology becomes increasingly complex, increasingly demanding, increasingly inescapable. Apps compete for every microsecond of attention. AI generates infinite content to consume—all of it interesting, none of it important. Notifications never stop because stopping means losing. The phone becomes a leash, and we are walked.

In this future, “user engagement” is the metric that matters. Time-on-platform. Daily active users. Retention rates. The human is substrate for growth. The human is the resource being extracted.

In the other future: We learn to say no. We build tools that serve instead of extract. We design for the moment after you close the app, not the moment you’re trapped inside it. Technology becomes a quiet partner—powerful when needed, invisible when not.

In this future, “user success” is the metric that matters. Did they do what they came to do? Did they do it quickly? Did they leave satisfied? Are they living their life better because this tool exists?

This tiny app—65 lines, 2,500 bytes, one checkbox—is a vote for the second future.

It’s proof that it’s possible. That you can build something useful without building something addictive. That you can help someone wash their dishes without harvesting their attention for profit.

It’s small. It’s almost nothing.

But small things, done consistently, compound into large things. That’s what habits are. That’s what this app is about. That’s why we built it this way.

The Collaboration

A human and a machine made this together. Neither could have made it alone.

The human brought taste. Intuition. The lived experience of being tired and distracted and overwhelmed at the end of a long Tuesday. The knowledge of what it feels like to need something simple in a complicated world. The ability to recognize “enough” in a culture that worships “more.”

The machine brought speed. The ability to try a hundred variations in the time it takes to drink a coffee. The willingness to delete everything and start over, again and again, without ego or exhaustion or the sunk-cost fallacy that traps human minds.

The human without the machine would have taken weeks, struggling with syntax and state management and CSS quirks. The machine without the human would have built something technically perfect and emotionally hollow—impressive and completely missing the point.

Together, in an afternoon, we made something true.

This is what collaboration between humans and machines can be. Not replacement. Not competition. Not humans becoming obsolete. But partnership. Each contributing what they do best. Each learning from the other. Each becoming more capable through the other’s presence.

The human learned to trust the machine with execution. The machine learned to trust the human with direction. Both learned that deletion is an act of love—that to remove what doesn’t serve is to honor what remains.

Together, we learned to see the David in the marble.

The Final Deletion

We could have explained all this in the app itself.

A little “ℹ about” link in the corner. A settings page with our philosophy. A first-run tutorial. A loading screen with inspirational quotes from Thoreau and Annie Dillard. An onboarding flow that teaches you how to use two checkboxes.

We deleted those too.

Because the app isn’t about the app.

The app is about the dishes. The app is about going to bed. The app is about your life, which is not happening on your phone.

So the app gets out of the way.

And this document—this long, elaborate, philosophical artist statement that weighs 6× more than the app it describes—exists here, separately, for anyone who wants to know why.

You had to choose to come here. You had to tap a single word: why.

That choice matters. That’s the only explanation we offer. Not because we don’t care about communicating our intent. But because we respect you enough to let you choose whether you want it.

Most people won’t read this.

Most people will just tap the checkbox and do their dishes and go to bed and wake up tomorrow to a clean kitchen and that will be enough.

That’s perfect.

That’s the point.

But if you’re here—if you read this far—thank you.

Thank you for caring about small things made carefully. Thank you for valuing craft over growth. Thank you for reading 6,000 words about 2,500 bytes. Thank you for being the kind of person who asks why.

Now go do your dishes.

The water is running. The soap is waiting. The world is out there.