Tools are the things we build that we don't ship - but that very much affect the artifact that we develop.
It can be tempting to either shy away from developing tooling entirely or (in larger organizations) to dedicate an entire organization to it.
In my experience, tooling should be built by those using it.
This is especially true for tools that improve the artifact by improving understanding: the best time to develop a debugger is when debugging!
Recent articles
- First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's general agent - 12th January 2026
- My answers to the questions I posed about porting open source code with LLMs - 11th January 2026
- Fly's new Sprites.dev addresses both developer sandboxes and API sandboxes at the same time - 9th January 2026