Some useful programs would make terrible portfolio pieces.
I mean the ugly little ones: a script to reshape a file, a calculator for one recurring decision, a tracker that only makes sense because I know the workflow it is tracking. No onboarding. No settings page. No user model.
This is not a failure mode. It is the point.
A small tool starts with an irritation, not a product idea. I copied that value again. I checked that state again. This spreadsheet is slowly becoming a bad programming language. The tool is allowed to stop there: take the repeated action, make it smaller, leave.
The best version is easy to delete.
That is one reason I do not mind modest personal repositories. They are not always meant to impress strangers. Sometimes they are just evidence that a problem got smaller for a while.
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