You do not think about the plumbing until it leaks. You do not think about grammar until someone breaks it. The best systems share a strange property: when they work, they vanish.
This is true of language, of cities, of software, of trust. A good conversation has a structure you never see. A good interface gets out of the way so completely you forget it is there. The work that goes into that invisibility is enormous, and almost entirely unrewarded, because the reward is that nobody notices.
It is a hard thing to build toward. Our instinct is to make our work visible, to show the effort. But the deepest craft points the other way: toward a system so smooth it feels like nothing at all.
The leak is loud. The pipe that holds is silent. I try to remember that the goal is not to be seen working. It is to make the friction disappear.
