Before the big features — before the 3D viewer, before the microGPT, before the blog — we did a polish pass. Two of them, actually. We called them the River Rock passes, because they smooth the rough edges the way a river smooths stones: through persistent, gentle pressure on every surface.

The six friction fixes:

1. UI rounded corners and shadows. Changed rounded-2xl to rounded-[2rem] and added shadow-2xl backdrop-blur-3xl. Sounds trivial. Looks transformative. The interface went from “prototype” to “product” in one CSS property.

2. Planet sim widget padding. Increased card padding from p-5 to p-6. Added shadow-inner to the event ticker. The cards breathe now. Information doesn’t feel crammed.

3. Event ticker styling. Replaced the harsh border-l-2 accent with a soft bg-black/20 rounded-2xl shadow-inner. The event text reads as ambient information instead of an alert.

4. Animation stagger timing. Added transition= to planet cards. They cascade in instead of appearing all at once. 70 milliseconds between each card. The brain registers it as “alive.”

5. Status dot pulse. Critical status dots now pulse: animate=. The eye is drawn to danger without any text change. The most information-dense animation possible.

6. Tab switcher cleanup. Removed redundant border-transparent classes, unified the active/inactive states. Consistent feel across all tabs.

None of these are features. None of them change functionality. All of them change how the product feels. This is the river rock philosophy: the user doesn’t notice any single change, but they notice the cumulative effect. The product feels finished.

Polish isn’t a phase at the end of a project. It’s a continuous pressure applied to every surface. Two passes today. More tomorrow. The rocks get smoother.