I deleted the headline feature three weeks after shipping it

Scenri’s first commit, on 4 August 2026, was version 0.1.0. It was published to npm on 16 August. Its README led with Compare.

“Every shot is a node in a tree. Branch an edit from any node, put the two side by side, and a drift-diff shows you exactly where the model changed your product when it should not have.”

On 6 September, in 0.8.3, I removed Compare. The drift heatmap went with it, and so did the export packs. The version tree stayed: every shot still keeps its parent. The commit is short about why.

“Compare goes, in the overlay and in the picked bar: it answered no question anyone asked”

The question nobody asked was mine first. I had stopped using Compare myself while designing shots.

The export packs got one line too: “nobody wanted the zip”.

#What replaced it

Iteration became a trail. Try again. Reuse setup. A Refine trail where the original stays accessible. Every shot keeps its recipe.

The same commit names the replacement for side by side. The trail “now puts the source one click away with the stage cross-fading between the two, which is the before and after”.

#It was not the only cut

The bulk five-view presenter build went on 8 September. The ledger says why: it “drew two frames nothing ever transported” and had no approval gate. The three views that replaced it held identity in 6 of 6.

Guide Me lost three of its five rows on 20 September. Five rows asked for a taxonomy before anything was on screen. The commit says it in one line: “Nobody pictures a shot from an adjective”. It became two questions, about worlds rather than attributes. Two days later a blind test pushed it to four.

On 8 September the presenter studio was built as my Figma frames drew it. The next day presenter creation became a conversation, and those files were deleted. Before 0.10.0 shipped, the pull request records the harder version: “The flow was broken deliberately, end to end, and rebuilt around one canonical state.”

#How a cut gets decided

The bet, written on 1 August, was that designer-grade UX is the moat open source never builds. The bar was screenshot-worthy, not technically impressive.

Some of it is written before any feature exists. Scenri has three commitments: local-first with no account, no telemetry, and your own AI. Anything that breaks one is out of scope however useful it sounds. The roadmap has a Not planned section, because a roadmap without one invites the same feature request every month. It names them: video in 0.x, publishing to social, accounts and teams, telemetry.

The rest happens in the design audit. Every part of a surface gets a verdict: keep, reduce, move, merge, remove, rewrite, redesign or scales badly. Information architecture and hierarchy are judged before spacing, weight, colour and motion.

“Polish applied to a surface that fails the first two is lipstick, and it is the most expensive kind of work to throw away.”