Most blog themes accumulate options the way a junk drawer accumulates batteries — nobody sets out to add forty settings, it just happens one reasonable-sounding feature request at a time. Sirocco's theme.yaml has exactly four: an accent color, a default color mode, a reading-time toggle, and a home page subtitle. That's not an oversight. It's the actual design.

The cost of an option nobody asked for

Every config option is a promise: it has to be documented, it has to be tested in combination with every other option, and it has to keep working across every future change to the theme. A toggle that ships because it seemed easy to add is still a toggle someone has to reason about a year later when something breaks in a configuration nobody actually uses. The cheapest option to maintain is the one that doesn't exist.

This isn't an argument against configurability in general — it's an argument for being deliberate about which four things earn a place in config_schema versus which hundred things get quietly decided once, in the stylesheet, and never revisited. Sirocco's type scale, its spacing rhythm, the shape of its post cards — none of that is configurable, and none of it needs to be. A visitor to a Sirocco-powered site should never be able to tell whether the person running it changed a setting or just left everything at its default, because the defaults are the actual design decision, not a placeholder waiting to be overridden.

What earns a config option

The four options that did make the cut share something: each one is a choice that's genuinely a matter of taste or context, not a matter of quality. Whether your brand color is blue or green isn't a design question Sirocco can answer for you — that's accent_color. Whether your readers land in a dark room or a bright office by default isn't something the theme can know — that's default_dark. Whether a reading-time estimate is useful or noise depends entirely on your audience — that's show_reading_time. And whether your home page needs an extra line of context is a decision about your specific site, not about Sirocco — that's home_subtitle.

Everything else — the grid, the type scale, the way a post's meta line is laid out, the exact shade of gray used for secondary text — is a design decision Sirocco has already made, on your behalf, so you don't have to. That's the actual value of using a theme instead of building a site from scratch: someone else already spent the time arguing with themselves about whether blockquotes should have a background tint (they shouldn't) so you don't have to.

If you're reading this in the demo site with show_reading_time turned on, you've just seen the feature working: this post is long enough to clock in at more than the flat "1 min" every shorter post here shows, because the estimate is computed from the actual rendered word count, not guessed.