For a while I thought the more you master a tool, the more control you have over it.

Tweak the config to perfection, commit every shortcut to muscle memory, write a small script to smooth out any rough edge — and sure, by the end of it the tool really does feel like yours. But there’s a catch: the time I spent tuning tools started to outpace the time I spent using them.

I remember spending an entire afternoon getting a code editor’s folding behavior to work exactly the way I wanted. I got it working. But the thing I actually meant to do that day — never happened.

Tools exist to reduce friction

This sounds obvious, but it took me a long time to genuinely believe it.

A tool’s job is to help you get somewhere with fewer stumbles — not to become the destination itself. The moment a tool turns into something you need to maintain, optimize, or “conquer,” it starts draining you instead of helping you.

The best tools share one trait: you don’t really think about them. Like a good keyboard — you just feel yourself typing.

What changed my mind

A system crash.

I was working on a borrowed machine — none of my carefully tuned environment. Vim at defaults, no shell aliases, no tmux.

I finished in two hours what I’d planned for the whole day.

Probably because there was nothing to fiddle with. I had no choice but to focus on the actual problem.

How I think about it now

Good enough is fine — but actually good enough. Not settling, but finding the point where friction is low enough, and stopping there.

Don’t chase consistency for its own sake. Using different tools for different contexts is fine. The one you reach for when writing docs doesn’t have to be the same one you use for code.

Ask yourself periodically: what has this thing actually done for me lately? If you can’t answer, it’s probably time to let it go.

Simpler tools make it easier to see what you’re doing. That’s not a call to go back to Notepad — it’s saying a tool’s complexity should match the problem it solves, not exceed it.

Everything beyond that is usually just a way to avoid doing the real work.