Speed remains software's most undervalued asset. The author champions nvALT, a plain-text note database that opens instantly and searches ten years of notes without lag. Its keyboard-first design — ESC returns focus to search — makes it feel like an off-board brain. Simplenote syncs across devices, but its macOS client lacks nvALT's millisecond responsiveness, a difference the author compares to premium versus budget garden shears.

Ulysses organizes long-form writing well but stutters on 5,000-word documents, re-rendering on each keystroke. That slowness erodes trust — if an app chokes on trivial input, sync reliability and data integrity become suspect. By contrast, Sublime Text handles 50,000-line files effortlessly and has only accelerated over a decade. It exemplifies software that unbloats over time.

Adobe illustrates the opposite trajectory. Lightroom and Photoshop have grown gangly; opening a new file dialog takes seconds, exporting 3-5 seconds. The author switched to Affinity Photo purely for speed. Meanwhile, Figma delivers browser-based performance that feels "loved" — its pen tool operates rationally, making speed manifest as intuitiveness. Sketch similarly won market share through velocity despite early reliability flaws.

Google Maps now suffers death by animation. Once a focused tool, it buries its marvelous data behind multi-tap exits and week-shifting UI variants. The author suspects a management culture endemic to Google, not engineering incompetence. Speed signals craft; its absence signals organizational decay.