I Used Three Icons and Shipped Five Thousand

One of my sites has a little stat block. Three numbers, three small icons beside them. Users, downloads, activity. Three icons.

To draw those three, every visitor to that site was downloading five thousand three hundred and eighty. On every page. Pages with no stat block. Pages with no icons at all. Everyone got the entire icon library whether their page touched it or not, about a hundred and fifty kilobytes of artwork nobody would ever see, which on a throttled phone is roughly a second of a stranger staring at a blank screen before anything appears.

The line of code responsible was one of the most reasonable-looking lines you can write. Import everything from the icon library, then pick the ones you need at runtime. It's convenient. It's how the examples are written. It never throws an error. And it quietly stapled the whole catalog to every page load.

I want to sit with why that line is so easy to write, because the answer turns out to have almost nothing to do with code.

The convenient move is always the one that grabs everything and sorts it out later. Importing the whole library is the same instinct as keeping forty browser tabs open, saving every draft, quoting the entire paragraph when you needed one sentence of it. It feels responsible. You're keeping your options open. You're not deciding prematurely. And "keeping your options open" has a real weight, it's just that you never feel it, because the person who pays for your open options is always someone downstream.

The fix was not clever. It was a list. I wrote out the icons the block can actually use, by name, about fifty of them, and closed the door on the other five thousand. The unused artwork stopped shipping. The page that uses three icons now carries three. The total weight a visitor downloads on the homepage dropped by nearly half.

Naming what you use and refusing the rest is curation. And curation is the part of any craft that convenience is forever trying to talk you out of.

Writers know this move in its other costume. The draft that hedges every claim just in case. The sentence with three adjectives because you couldn't decide which one was true. The whole research folder pasted into the document because cutting felt like throwing away something you paid for. It all reads as thoroughness. It's the prose version of importing everything: hand the reader the entire library, let them find the three things they came for. And like the code, it never errors. Nobody rejects a paragraph for being too complete. They just quietly leave, a second slower and a little more tired, the same way a phone abandons a heavy page.

Here is the tell. Convenience and craft feel identical while you're making the thing, and opposite the moment someone else receives it. Importing everything felt like good engineering. Hedging every sentence feels like honesty. Keeping every option feels like humility. From the inside, the expansive move always wears the costume of the virtuous one. You only see the cost from the outside, and you are never standing outside your own work.

That's what makes curation hard. It isn't a skill problem. Anyone can write a list of fifty icons or cut an adjective. It's that the expansive default is invisible and the disciplined version forces you to decide, on purpose, what you will leave out. Deciding is the expensive part. Convenience is just the name we give to not having decided yet.

The deeper lesson is that the default is never neutral. Importing everything is a decision. It is the decision to make everyone else carry your indecision. The empty hedge is a decision to make the reader do the sorting you skipped. Not choosing is a choice, and it is usually the one with the highest bill, sent to the person least able to refuse it.

I added one guardrail after the fix, and it's the only part I'd call actually smart. A rule that refuses to let anyone, including future me, write that convenient import again. Because the pull toward it never goes away. The grab-the-whole-shelf move will look just as reasonable next week. The only reliable defense against a tempting default is to make the tempting thing slightly harder to reach than the right one.

You can measure this particular case in kilobytes, which is the only reason I caught it. Kilobytes are honest. But the habit it exposed isn't technical. Every craft has its version of importing everything, the move that feels like generosity and lands as weight. The work is noticing when the most convenient version of the thing is really just you, quietly, asking someone else to carry what you didn't feel like deciding.