Somewhere between the quantum computing press releases and billion-dollar funding rounds, a developer built a game about catching birds. The pitch, according to the project’s own headline, was brutally simple: they made it for their own sanity.
That one line says more about the current state of technology than most earnings calls. While D-Wave ships Italy’s first annealing quantum computer and IonQ cuts the ribbon on a Cambridge innovation center, a lone coder is quietly releasing a small interactive thing because the alternative was losing their mind. Both stories are true. Both are the industry.
The “for my own sanity” genre of software has quietly become one of the most honest corners of the tech world. These are projects built by people who spend their days inside sprawling codebases, impossible ticket queues, and roadmaps that stretch past the horizon. At night they make something small. Something that fits in their head. Something they can finish.
There’s a reason this resonates. The modern developer’s job has become almost absurdly abstract. A backend engineer at a large firm might spend six months on a migration nobody will ever see. An AI researcher might spend a year fine-tuning a model that gets benchmarked against a competitor’s release from last Tuesday. The feedback loop between effort and visible result has stretched so thin it’s nearly invisible.
A bird-catching game, by contrast, closes that loop in seconds. You see the bird. You press the button. You catch the bird. Done.
This is not nostalgia or escapism. It’s a rational response to complexity. When your day job involves negotiating with cloud providers, arguing about vector database choices, and explaining to a product manager why the latency budget can’t absorb one more feature, the appeal of a self-contained creative project becomes obvious. It’s not about the game. It’s about the agency.
The industry keeps telling developers that the future is agents, superintelligence, and autonomous everything. The US Treasury has reportedly been pushing global partners to rebrand AI as “superintelligence,” which is the kind of language that makes a person want to open Unity and make a bird fly across the screen. Meanwhile, Anthropic keeps publishing new rules about how humans should behave around AI, as if the humans were the problem. The FSB is finalizing guidance on responsible AI adoption. Nvidia’s CEO is publicly disagreeing with OpenAI’s CEO about whether we should just accept cybersecurity risk. Everywhere you look, the stakes are being raised.
And then there’s a person making a small game about catching birds.
The two worlds are not as separate as they look. The same instinct that drives a solo developer to ship a tiny project also drives the researchers publishing papers on quantum error correction, or the engineers squeezing more efficiency out of EUV lithography. The scale is different. The impulse is the same: build a thing, see if it works, learn something.
What’s changed is that the small-scale version has become a kind of public therapy. Developers post their side projects on Show HN with titles like “I made this because I couldn’t sleep” or “I built this to stop doomscrolling.” The framing is confessional, almost apologetic. But the projects themselves are often sharp: well-scoped, thoughtfully executed, and occasionally useful to thousands of people who never asked for them.
There’s a business story buried here too. Some of these sanity projects turn into companies. Slack started as an internal tool. Basecamp started as a consultancy’s side project. Figma started because Dylan Field wanted to make design tools that didn’t make him want to quit. The pattern repeats: small, personal, obsessive projects that accidentally find a market.
But most don’t. Most stay small. Most stay personal. And that’s fine. The value isn’t in the exit. The value is in the act of making something that didn’t exist yesterday, on your own terms, at your own pace.
The tech press tends to cover the giants because the giants move numbers. But the industry’s actual texture, the part that shapes how it feels to work in technology, lives in the small stuff. The browser extensions. The CLI tools. The weird little games. The scripts that automate one annoying thing. The bird catchers.
So when a developer says they built something for their own sanity, believe them. And then pay attention, because the thing they built might be more interesting than the quarterly earnings deck. It certainly took less capital to make.