Lighthouse 100 is a personality disorder

I have shipped, by my own count, four production sites with all four Lighthouse audit scores above ninety-nine. I am not proud of this. Each one cost me at least a day I will not get back, on something the user could not perceive.

There is a normal version of caring about performance. It looks like: serve the right thing, cache the right thing, don't ship a megabyte of bundled abstraction for a contact form. There is a second version that lives in a different building. It looks like: spend an afternoon eliminating the last two CSS rules so the unused-rules audit clears, then realize the audit was scoring a sibling page that no human will ever load.

I built this site to test whether I could do the second version on purpose, with full self-awareness, and call it a feature instead of a tic. The answer is yes, but only barely, and only because the budget I set is visible to readers. The colophon says fourteen kilobytes. The bytes are the brand.

I am not recommending this. I am admitting it.

The honest test for performance work is: can you describe, in one sentence, the user behavior that gets better? "First-byte under thirty milliseconds so the back button feels native" is a sentence. "Lighthouse score went from 98 to 100" is not.