There's a version of this essay where I tell you to use the best tool for the job. That version is boring and wrong.
The best tool for the job is the one you know deeply. Not the most powerful one, not the newest one, not the one with the best benchmarks. The one you've used long enough to stop thinking about it — so you can think about the actual problem.
On mastery
There's a period with any tool where you're fighting it. The interface feels wrong, the abstractions leak, the error messages lie to you. Most people quit here. They move to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing.
The ones who push through don't just become faster. They start to see with the tool rather than through it. The constraints stop being obstacles and start being the medium.
A sculptor doesn't fight marble. They learn what marble wants to do and work with that tendency, not against it.
The underrated virtue of boring tools
There's status in using new things. There's no status in using the tool you've had for six years. But the six-year tool has a compounding advantage that no new tool can match: you've already paid the learning cost.
I've written better work in a 10-year-old text editor than in shiny new ones with AI built in. Not because the old editor is better — it's objectively not — but because I've stopped seeing it. I see the words.
That's the whole game.
The trap
The trap is mistaking novelty for progress. A new tool reorganizes your problems, it doesn't solve them. You still have to do the hard thinking. You still have to make the hard choices. You still have to show up.
Pick your constraints. Then stop picking.