Coverage is not an answer

Search any trade for tooling and you get the same artifact. A list. Four hundred entries, alphabetical or paid, each with a logo and a sentence that could describe any of them.

The list is not wrong. Every entry on it is real. It is just useless, because it answers a question nobody asked. Nobody wakes up needing to know that four hundred options exist. They need to know which one to buy on Thursday.

Why the list keeps getting built

Coverage is measurable and defensible. You can say the directory has four hundred entries. You cannot say it is right. Add an entry and the number goes up. Rank the entries and someone is going to be unhappy about where they landed.

So the incentive runs one way. Nobody was ever fired for adding a row.

What we do instead

We cut. A page here names a default and says why. It says what to buy first, what to skip until month six, and what to ignore entirely.

That means being wrong in public sometimes. A default we named will turn out to be the wrong call for somebody's situation, and they will say so. That is a fair trade. The alternative is a page that is never wrong because it never says anything.

The test we use: could a reader act on this page today, without opening another tab? If the answer is no, the page is not finished.