The importance of whimsy — Christian Safka
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The importance of whimsy
10 August 2026 · 2 min read
In elementary school, we used to play a game with my classmates. It was a team-based PvP game with several hero classes, abilities, and maps. How did we get away with playing it for hours on end during the school day? Simple, it took place entirely in our imagination, alongside a few scribbles in the back of my notebook to keep track of a few numbers.
I'd define whimsy as the practice of playful and unusual imagination.
As we go through the traditional education system and become adults with jobs, whimsy is systematically driven out of us through routine, rules, and responsibility. Routine reduces the amount of novel inputs our brain receives. Rules and responsibility keep us grounded in our current reality, as straying implies risk.
Whimsy in engineering
When tackling a problem, there is a finite amount of optimization you can do. Your solution may be 2-3 times better than the previous. If you're looking for a 10x or 100x better solution, you'll find they often require a reframing of the problem, or in other words, thinking outside the box.
Coding LLMs are great at optimizing for an objective, and lets use real-time translation as an example. AI might plan, implement, gather data, and train a great voice translation model for English<>French. It won't however stop to consider if the people in that conversation should just be instructed to learn a third language that is uniquely designed for their conversation. Because that's an absurd concept... or is it? In the future we might be able to consume information a lot faster. We might even be able to smell it.
What I tried to illustrate with that example was approaching a problem not from a base of logic, but with "fresh eyes", letting the mind take playful or unusual avenues.
End note
I've always felt that software engineering is inherently creative, but admittedly most of my creative decisions happen after I ground myself in reality. "I know what's possible and I can get creative but only within these bounds". That type of creativity drives most software engineering, and rightfully so, but I believe the best whimsy originates from the other side of the brain, and to harness it you must let the logical thinking come after.
Still practicing.