It’s Easy Until You Remove the Tools

I made Two Pixels to the Left after seeing a color matching game Geoff Teehan and the Lightspark team put out. It was simple, sharp, and weirdly refreshing. No tricks. No polish for polish’s sake. Just a quiet dare that says: you think you can see this, right?

Most of us assume we’re good at these things. Color. Alignment. Visual judgment. Especially if we spend our days staring at screens for years on end. It feels basic. Muscle memory. Obvious.

And then you try it.

Suddenly it’s not so clear. You’re squinting. Second-guessing. Nudging things back and forth like maybe the problem is your eyes. Or your brain. Or your confidence.

What I like about these moments is that they remind us how much we rely on our tools. Zoom levels, snapping, color pickers, overlays, grids. They quietly do a lot of work for us. When you strip them away, it’s not that we’re bad. It’s that we’ve been assisted for so long we forgot where the line actually is.

Two Pixels to the Left is just a tiny version of that realization that I put a whole 30 minutes into with Claude. A small, slightly annoying reminder that “easy” often isn’t, and that precision usually lives somewhere between perception and support.

It’s quick. It’s playful. It might humble you a bit.

Which is kind of the point.