What the tools are still good at
Most of what I write about this goes one way, so the other way deserves saying too. The tools are good. Good in the way a decent hand tool is good, the kind you stop noticing because it does the job.
What the tools are good at has not changed since the first week. The dull parts. A config file with a syntax I can never remember. A small script that moves a file around once a night. A first draft of anything, which I rewrite by hand anyway, because a first draft is a first draft. The error that would have taken me an evening to trace, handed back with the line in it.
None of that is the interesting half of the trade. None of it is why I got into this. But it is a real slice of a working day, and it has quietly gone.
So the honest trade is this. I am faster, and faster is what gets bought. When a job goes back to a client sooner, the price follows it down. That is not a client being unfair. It is arithmetic, and I would do the same from that chair.
The question I get asked, and the one I ask myself, is why I still use it if this is what it does. The answer is not noble. Refusing would not stop any of it. It would make me slower and poorer while the same change came in through another door, and I would be doing the work badly on purpose. I also use it because there is no other way to know what it can do. Reading about a tool is not the same as running it every day for a living.
My rule used to be to read the docs until the answer turned up. Now it is to ask the tool, then read the docs to find out whether it lied. The second half of that habit has never once been wasted.
The bit I did not expect is which parts of the job I miss. I thought I would miss the writing. What I miss is being stuck. An afternoon on one stubborn problem with the tea going cold and no idea whether I was close. That is rare now, and I can hear myself calling it a loss, which is a strange thing to say about being stuck.
I have stopped inventing a picture of where this goes. The tool stays open on the desk, I still open it every morning, and I still hand work over with my name on it. That is not a defence of the trade. It is what is true today.