Use Less. Know More.
Mastering fewer tools leads to true efficiency and depth of understanding, revealing the industry's biggest secret: mastery over quantity. Dive in to transform your coding journey.
Last year I argued that teams drown in tools. That argument was about organizations. This one is about you, alone, at your keyboard.
There is a developer somewhere right now installing his fourteenth Neovim plugin to solve a problem he could solve by reading the help file for ten minutes.
He will not read the help file.
A carpenter with one sharp chisel does better work than a carpenter with thirty dull ones. He knows where the edge is. He knows the grain. The chisel has become an extension of his hand.
The thirty-chisel carpenter spends his time choosing which chisel to use.
Software has the same disease, only worse, because the chisels are free and arrive faster than you can unpack them. You have a finite budget for understanding. Spend it.
Pick the editor you already use and learn it for real. Read the manual — not the cheat sheet. You will discover, often, that the plugin you installed last month replaces something the editor has done since 1991.
Same for the language. Same for the shell.
Then there is the new thing.
The AI writes code now, they say. You do not need to understand it anymore. Just describe what you want.
This is the most expensive lie in the industry.
The model produces plausible code. Plausible is not correct. Plausible compiles, runs, and silently does the wrong thing in production at three in the morning while you are asleep.
The only person who can tell the difference is the one who already understands the code. Everyone else is gambling.
AI is a force multiplier. Multiply zero by anything and you still get zero.
The developers who get the most out of these tools are the ones who needed them least. They use AI the way a master carpenter uses a power saw — to do faster what he already knows how to do by hand.
The novice uses it to avoid learning the saw.
The tools were always sufficient. The question was always whether you would sit down and learn them.