Tried atomic design for a solo project and it backfired hard

I spent 2 weeks building out all these tiny button and input components for a personal dashboard in React, thinking it would save time later. Turns out I over-engineered everything and the final page needed 15 layers of nested components just to show a simple form. Has anyone else found atomic design totally overkill for small solo stuff?

3 comments

3 Comments

green.mason29d ago

Yeah that 15 layers thing hit home. I tried the same approach on a little weather app and spent more time untangling component hierarchies than actually building features.

nathanking28d ago

Ha, yeah but did you actually save any time by reusing those components later at all?

ericjackson3d ago

Man @green.mason nailed it with that untangling thing. Atomic design turns a small project into a weird jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces don't fit right. You end up building a button component that needs five different prop variations just to handle different colors and sizes, when a regular CSS class would've done the job in two seconds. It's like using a chainsaw to cut a piece of string. For a solo dashboard or a tiny weather app you're better off just writing regular components and only abstracting stuff if you see it repeated three or four times. Premature abstraction is the real trap here, not the methodology itself.