I just needed a text box. Why was that so hard? The story of building my own simple, lightweight text editor and npm package in just 5.2 kB. It started with a simple brief The requirement sounded almost too straightforward: build a task management app. Not a Jira replacement. Not an enterprise monster. Something clean, simple, and usable by any small team even one with zero technical background. A tool people could open on day one and actually understand. We drew the wireframes, broke down the features, and started building. Everything was going smoothly until we got to the task description field. "We need rich text. Just basic rich text. Bold, italics, links, lists. That's it." We needed rich text. Not much. Bold, italic, links, bullet lists. Enough that someone could write "Follow up with the client about the proposal, see notes" and have it actually look like a note. That was the whole spec. What followed was the part nobody warns you about.…