10:21pm. My eyes were on fire.
Sixteen hours in the chair, fourth day running. Hunched. The kind of tired where your eyes don't just ache. They feel like they're losing strength, like the muscles behind them are quietly giving out.
I'd thrown everything at it. Supplements. Eye drops. The whole drawer. Nothing touched it.
You tell yourself you'll deal with it later. But you're always in the middle of something. That's the part nobody warns you about when you start building with this stuff. It gets its hooks in.
At 10:21pm on day four, later wasn't coming. So I did the thing that still sounds slightly insane out loud. I pointed Claude at my own eyes.
I didn't want a nicer theme. I wanted to stop my eyes from degrading. So I sent hundreds of agents off to dig through the actual research: eye strain, light versus dark, contrast, colour temperature, what's quietly frying your retinas at midnight. Thousands of tokens, just to engineer one terminal around one pair of tired eyes. Soft light palette. The right font. Tuned to my screen. The same calm colours across the shell, the git diffs, all of it.
An hour later it was done. And it was good. Better than anything I'd have found online, because it wasn't built for a million people. It was built for the exact thing wrecking me.
Then I sat back and did the math on what that hour used to cost.
A terminal built from eye-health research, tuned to one person. That used to be a project. Years of school just to start. Years on the job to get good. Then weeks, months of building and testing, usually with a team behind you. Five, ten years of pooled human attention before anyone shipped a line. I described it in a sentence and had it back before bed.
Money was the cheap part. The real cost was always time, and the stress of all that time.
That math is what got me. Years of your life, and the low background dread of never quite knowing if any of it would work. AI didn't make that cheaper. It deleted it.
So what's left? When anyone can summon the thing, the tools stop being the wall. What's scarce now is the human part. Whether you even notice the friction in your own day. Whether you've got the will to fix it instead of just complaining about it. The discipline to finish. And then the hardest part of all: getting a single other person to care it exists.
I keep circling one thought. Everyone's wired differently, right down to the genes. The exact way your brain takes in the world is yours and nobody else's. So nobody else gets annoyed by precisely the things that annoy you. The friction only you can see is yours to fix. Multiply that across every person alive, and it's about the best thing that could happen to us.
Squintless is a tiny one. It's a terminal theme, honestly. But it's the whole idea in miniature: my eyes were dying, I fixed it in an evening, and now it's one line anyone can run.
I'm two months into writing code. No CS degree, no background to speak of. I didn't know the first thing about setting up a terminal, or picking a theme, or which font to load into VS Code. I wish someone had warned me where this road goes before I started down it. Nobody did. So I'm writing it down and putting the fix out there, in case it reaches someone exactly like me before their eyes pay for it too.
My terminal's the colour of warm paper now. I'm looking at it as I write this. And for the first time in a long while, my eyes aren't asking me to stop.
— Sameer