Legibility of Effort · eieio.games<br>Legibility of Effort<br>How hard is anything now? I don't know.<br>Jun 22, 2026

So:

Lots of work is easier because of LLMs, and

Lots of heuristics we used to gauge effort are broken because of LLMs, so

Conveying effort to others is harder because of LLMs

And:

“Someone spent time on this” is a proxy for “this is worth engaging with” and

I appreciate projects that take a lot of effort and

I like it when people appreciate that I spent effort on something

But also:

Making a good thing still requires making lots of decisions, and

Making lots of decisions is still very hard, despite LLMs, so

Making good things is still very hard

As a creative technologist I’ve found this paralyzing. And as someone who loves novel internet projects I’ve found it frustrating. I’ve heard similar things from many of my friends.

What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort - the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work.

I typed these words with my fingers

I wrote this blog post in my text editor. It took me a while.

Until recently, “someone cared enough to write this” was an ok heuristic. Plenty of writing on the internet was bad, but you could convince me that you cared about something just by writing it down.

this post was bad

Of course, generating plausible-looking text - or a plausible-looking website - is trivial now.

For me, this means it’s harder to find good stuff worth engaging with online. And on a larger scale, systems built on easily gauging effort at a glance are falling apart.

Open Source

In January, the (incredible) whiteboarding tool tldraw started automatically closing pull requests from external contributors because they’d “recently seen a significant increase in contributions generated entirely by AI tools” and were struggling to manage their contributions.

It’s disappointing - if not surprising - that people are spamming open source projects with slop.

But the problem isn’t just the spam! It’s that identifying low-effort work is difficult.

“When code was hard to write and low-effort work was easy to identify, it was worth the cost to review the good stuff.

(Internet bloggers who aggregate cool stuff have the same problem; here’s Robin Sloan on the scourge of AI self-promotion. I’ve heard similar complaints from the amazing Andy Baio)

Some maintainers are inventing new ways to identify low-effort work like “poisoning” agent context so that poorly-managed agents add files that say “I am a sad, dumb little AI driver with no real skills.”

gottem (credit sebastienlorber on twitter)

This is very funny! Unfortunately I can’t filter all of my browsing this way.

But I can learn to notice the signs.

Vibecoding

Some friends of mine have a discord thread where we log signs of vibecoded websites. And our examples are startlingly similar to what Wes mentions here:

why do so many vibecoded sites do the 'live' thing? I don't get it.

Wes’s tweet was a hit - lots of people have noticed the same things. I think we’re paying attention to these details because they make effort - or the lack of effort - more legible.

There’s nothing objectively wrong with making a website with a warm-cream background and hero text in a sans-serif font with a single accent word that uses an eye-catching color and a different font.

who do you think made this

But when I see a website that has the default Claude style I assume that the author put ~no thought into how the site should look. And I often assume that the author didn’t put too much thought into the site at all.

That’s not fair of me! But “someone made this website” is no longer enough to tell me that the website was important to them. So “default Claude style” is one of my new heuristics.

Hard, useless things

A few years ago I made a version of Flappy Bird that ran inside MacOS Finder.

It took a bunch of work!

Loading...<br>this took way too long

This was the first project I made that got attention on the internet. My writeup was on top of Hacker News and got mentions from blogs like John Gruber’s.

John called Flappy Dird “useless but completely joyful,” and many comments elsewhere said the same thing.

“There are two types of hacks I just love: those that are surprisingly useful, and those that are utterly useless but completely joyful. Pretty clear which type Flappy Dird is.

But the joy of Flappy Dird wasn’t just that it was useless. It was that it was useless and that I had spent meaningful time and effort building it.

I love expending effort to make an excellent but useless thing, making my effort legible by writing it up, and then seeing strangers appreciate that effort.

And now I feel less confident that I can make my effort legible to others. For some projects I’m not sure I’ll have to expend effort at all! So I spend less time blogging about making computers do funny things.

However, I haven’t seen a flood of other people running games inside...