Notion is a marvel. It feels powerful because it is. You can drag a database into a page, turn a list into a Kanban board, and link everything together. It feels like building.
But it's a trap.
Notion teaches you that building means assembling pre-made parts. It's simulated composability. Like Lego, the standard is in the joint. The pieces snap together perfectly, but only where the designer put a stud. You can build a castle, but not a real castle.
The composition space is bounded by the designed interface. You are playing in their sandbox, with their physics.
Real building happens in the open world.
In the open world — text files, code, programmatic interfaces — the standard is in the substrate. Because the substrate (text) is universal, you don't need pre-defined slots. The connection isn't a permission granted by the object; it's an operation you perform on the material. You can grep, pipe, script, and transform anything.
Simulated composability is safer. It has training wheels. But training wheels don't teach you to balance—they teach you to lean. You learn to rely on the provided stability instead of creating your own.
If you want to build something the designer didn't anticipate, you need a machine shop, not a Lego set.
2025-11-19