Why I still write plain CSS for my own things

There's a version of every side project where I spend two evenings on tooling and zero on the thing. Plain CSS with a small token layer is my hedge against that.

The trick is committing to a token set early: three greys, one accent, one warm glow, one radius. When the palette is that small, every new component composes itself.

I still reach for utilities on teams. But alone, at midnight, I'd rather read a stylesheet I could rewrite from memory.