The argument is not that craft is decoration. The argument is that craft is structure — that the decisions you make at every level of a thing, including the levels nobody sees, are what determine whether the thing survives contact with time.
A cable run in a commercial security installation either makes sense to the person who opens the ceiling panel in five years or it doesn't. The install either diagnoses quickly or it doesn't. The documentation either exists or the next technician bills the client for two hours of figuring out what I was thinking. Legibility is not a feature. It is the architecture.
The parallel in code
1 CUBE CSS is Andy Bell's methodology — Composition, Utility, Block, Exception. The insight is that CSS already has a cascade; the architecture should work with it rather than around it.
The same principle holds in web development. A CUBE CSS architecture with named custom properties throughout is not an aesthetic preference. It is a position about what makes a codebase durable. When the client's next developer opens the project, they should understand the token system in the first ten minutes. They should understand the layout architecture in thirty. If they can't, I failed — not at making something beautiful, but at making something legible.
Every technical decision is an argument about what matters. Choosing 11ty over a React framework for a content site is an argument about ownership. Choosing Cloudflare Pages over Vercel is an argument about lock-in. Choosing vanilla CSS over Tailwind is an argument about whether your styles should be readable as prose or as a compression algorithm.
The precision of the cable run and the precision of the CSS architecture are the same precision. The materials differ; the thinking transfers. — Personal notebook, 2024
What transfers
The lesson from twelve years of taking things apart — devices, camera systems, codebases, arguments — is that legibility is always a choice. Illegibility is faster, cheaper, and easier. Making something that a stranger can understand without calling you is the harder path, and it is the only path that doesn't create dependency.
This is why the Library of Matt exists. Not as a portfolio — portfolios are performance. This is a record of how one person thinks about building things, maintained at the level of detail that allows the thinking to be examined, borrowed, argued with, or discarded.
The ambition is not to be read widely. The ambition is to be read carefully.