Indie Maker W30 | Aesthetic Fatigue, Token Surplus, and Learning to Be Lazy

Today is day 214 of my one-person company. This Indie Maker column is where I record my own growth and how the business is going. I hope you find something useful in it.

This week:

1. Only 130 days left in the year
2. A conversation about "aesthetic fatigue"
3. Learning to be lazy
4. Token surplus
5. The products that surprised me this week: Grok Build and Grok Bot
6. I play chess while waiting on AI — what about you?

Only 130 days left in the year

Here's a horror story: there are only 130 days left in the year. Which isn't hard to make sense of — today is day 214 of my one-person company, so the two clocks are running almost in sync. Still, realizing the year wraps up in four months makes time feel like it's flying.

Friday evening I stepped outside, looked up, and caught this sunset. I snapped it and saved it as an August calendar in ColorWander — and the literary line it paired with landed exactly on how I felt standing there.

A conversation about "aesthetic fatigue"

This week I happened to scroll past a post that went: "I've hit aesthetic fatigue on the whole black-white-grey + polka dots + pink bows + music notes + angel wings thing, plus the thin-weight English and Korean lettering. It's blanketed the lower-tier platforms. What used to look cool has turned into a plate of leftover combo food someone's shoving in my mouth."

A really thought-provoking observation.

These past couple of years, as AI has pushed down the cost of producing every kind of content, people keep reaching for the words "aesthetics" or "taste." Riffing on that post, I started a conversation with AI:

1. Why do I no longer like something I used to find good-looking?

Taste isn't really about "does this look good." It's more like: a group of people share one set of symbols for a stretch of time, and through sheer use that set goes from "has taste" to "instantly nameable." Once you can name it, the beauty demotes itself to inventory.

In a word: taste is a function of scarcity.

2. Does blindly following a trend make a good-looking thing lose its beauty through overexposure?

Yes, it loses beauty through overexposure — but not because the thing got uglier. The bow is still the same bow. What changed is that it no longer says anything. It used to say "I noticed this, I chose this"; after the pile-on it only says "I use the same set as everyone in the feed." The beauty is still in the object; what stops working is the distinction. So it isn't "used too much, therefore ugly" — it's that spreading it everywhere, at the same time, in the same form, with no restraint, exhausted the signal.

Which is exactly where Think different and Make something different earn their keep. Think different means noticing that a set of symbols has become nameable and choosing not to add to it. Make something different is the real work: building something that can't be named at a glance. Treat Think different as nothing but a slogan and the slogan itself becomes inventory soon enough.

Learning to be lazy

Friday night I rebuilt my marketing and business dashboard. Until now, pulling ASC (App Store Connect, Apple's data console for developers) numbers meant exporting them by hand — which meant it couldn't update daily, and it was a chore.

So I asked AI whether it could be automated, and sure enough there's an API. Which is the lesson: on work like this, don't be too industrious. Learn to be lazy and let AI do it.

Business dashboard officially upgraded.

At some point I'd like to write a proper piece on how I use AI to pull the data automatically and run business diagnostics and tracking on top of it. Curious whether anyone would actually be interested in this dashboard setup of mine?

Token surplus

Years ago I read a book called Cognitive Surplus. I can't remember much of what was in it, but I've always liked the phrase — and in the AI era, I'd say "token surplus = cognitive surplus." Why?

The moment that brought this home recently:

I'd just bought Grok's $300 plan (more on that below), and I had usage to spare, so this week I built ColorWander with one hand and did a full cleanup of my Obsidian vault with the other — basically housework for my knowledge base.

Once the vault was tidy, all the context about me finally had somewhere to settle. A few things came out of it. One was pulling together every post I've ever published on my personal site and my regular social accounts, in full. That'll make it much easier to sit down with AI later and do some self-analysis.

The point of the example: because I had tokens to spare, I started looking for the things I'd never had the time or resources to do, and spending the surplus on them. A related observation — every time Codex hands out a usage reset, either I or someone I know ends up making something new.

So: in the AI era, no amount of tokens is too many. Keep a token surplus (you don't have to spend it, but you do need to have it).

The products that surprised me this week: Grok Build and Grok Bot

Picking up from "token surplus" — early Sunday morning last week I came across a Grok discount, took one look at how good the deal was, and grabbed it on the principle that getting in is winning.

Since then I've been using Grok's CLI agent — Grok Build (their answer to Claude Code / Codex) — in some of my non-core work.

Grok's TUI (terminal UI): the design quality, how good it looks, how transparent and friendly it is about what's happening mid-task — saying it runs circles around Claude Code is no exaggeration.

For casual chat I use Grok Bot. How to describe it — Grok Bot is like a certain kind of colleague: not the smartest, not the strongest at the actual craft, but genuinely fast, and reliably delivers a 70-out-of-100 result. If your bar for the output isn't that high, it's a pleasant surprise.

Grok Bot has also absorbed a bunch of the ideas that made OpenClaw take off earlier this year (heartbeats, plugin-ecosystem connections, agent group chats). Given how weak Grok has been in the past, what they shipped here is decent enough (rumor has it the Cursor team is behind it). My weekly notes and diary this week were all put together on walks, in the car, or on the subway — talking to Grok Bot and dumping it straight into Notion.

That said, Grok's raw intelligence still can't touch the SOTA models (Fable5, GPT5.6 Sol), so I can't hand it my most important work.

I play chess while waiting on AI — what about you?

Two months ago I started playing chess in the Duolingo app. Something I've noticed about myself lately: I've been playing a lot of chess. It's all during the gaps while I wait for AI to finish, but it still pulls my attention away.

So I've started deliberately cutting back. Now, while I'm waiting on AI, I go reply to posts on my social accounts and work on growing them instead.

So — what do you do while you're waiting on AI?

Finally

Shot on a run on Sunday night, saved as a ticket stub with ColorWander.

That's it for this week. See you next week 👋