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
- Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson - 26th November 2025
- Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult - 24th November 2025
- sqlite-utils 4.0a1 has several (minor) backwards incompatible changes - 24th November 2025