--- title: "Fireflies and glows and sliders | yjsoon" description: "I burned a terrifyingly large number of Claude Fable tokens trying to make one word on our Tinkercademy homepage look good at tinkercademy.com." canonical: "https://yjsoon.com/posts/2026-07-25-the-delightful-version/" language: "en" --- # Fireflies and glows and sliders 25 Jul 2026 I burned a terrifyingly large number of Claude Fable tokens trying to animate *one word* nicely on our [Tinkercademy](https://tinkercademy.com/) homepage. Your browser does not support embedded video. How this happened: - I started by telling Claude that our existing animated glow effect was too subtle, and asked it to brainstorm a few ideas “with some of your smart designer subagent friends”. - I asked it to present every iteration as a [Claude artifact](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9487310-what-are-artifacts-and-how-do-i-use-them). HTML *is* easier to read than Markdown! I browsed, chose what I liked, got Claude to continue riffing. - Saw a link to [canvasui.dev](https://canvasui.dev/), an impressive showcase of web effects, on X, so I sent it over to Claude: “can you get inspiration from these pls” - Towards the end, I got it to build me an interactive prototype to adjust the “fireflies” and “spotlight” effect it implemented - see [https://claude.ai/code/artifact/a1591a0b-10c8-47c6-ad5b-f4796ec43240](https://claude.ai/code/artifact/a1591a0b-10c8-47c6-ad5b-f4796ec43240) - Yes, it’s all slop, but whatever — I’m happy to have this sloppy code generated to tune the thing I actually care about! - Total effort: 10 iterations, 4-5 hours (while also multi-tasking on other things at an agentically unhealthy level). I’m really happy with how it turned out! And I’m reminded of this piece from game designer [@paularambles on X](https://x.com/paularambles): > We’ve always been told “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” That made sense when “perfect” cost a sprint, and “good” cost an afternoon, but when “perfect” costs an hour, and “good” costs five minutes, maybe it’s time to retire that saying. We don’t have to agonize over whether something is worth attempting, instead we can just try it, and if it doesn’t work, we can try something else. We always wanted to build the delightful version, and now we can, while having the most fun we’ve had building software. Source: [“The Death of Good Enough”, which I wrote about in March](https://yjsoon.com/posts/2026-03-13-the-death-of-good-enough). What a time to build, man. To discuss, or if you feel compelled to press some kind of reaction button, feel free to comment on the [LinkedIn version of this post](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7486697745295073280/). * * * -  [ai](https://yjsoon.com/tags/ai/) -  [coding](https://yjsoon.com/tags/coding/) -  [vibe-coding](https://yjsoon.com/tags/vibe-coding/) * * *