The tools will change again
Half of last year's stack is already gone. A short note on where to put the hours when the software won't sit still.
We updated our internal tools list this month, the one we keep so new collaborators know what we build with. Nearly half the entries from last year’s version are gone. Not deprecated by us in some fit of discipline, just superseded. Out-shipped. The 2024 churn is real, and anyone keeping score has cramped hands.
A few years ago a stack was something you settled into, like a chair. You learned your tools deeply because they’d still be there in five years, and the learning compounded. That deal is off. Now the design tool adds a feature that erases a plugin, the plugin becomes a company, the company becomes a checkbox in someone else’s product by spring. We’ve stopped predicting which of the things open on our screens in October will still be open in March.
Which sounds like chaos, and partly is. But it clarified something for us about where the hours should go.
Learn tools loosely. Learn principles tightly.
Loose means: get functional fast, stay curious, keep no loyalty. Run the new thing for a week on real work, not a demo. If it earns a place, fine; if not, close the tab without ceremony. The skill worth building isn’t mastery of any single tool anymore; it’s the speed at which you can become dangerous in the next one, because there will always be a next one.
Tight means the opposite posture entirely. Hierarchy still decides what gets read first. Contrast still steers the eye. A story still needs a reason to exist and a person it’s for. Type still has to breathe, and a brand still has to sound like itself no matter what rendered it. None of that shipped in a release this year, and none of it will be sunset in the next one. Principles are the part of the craft that doesn’t rotate, which makes them the only sensible place to sink deep time.
This split settles arguments around here more often than you’d expect. When someone asks whether the whole team should retrain on the newest platform, the answer is now a question: is this a tool or a principle? Tools get an afternoon and a trial project. Principles get years, repetition, apprenticeship, the whole slow treatment. Confusing the two is how studios end up expert in software that no longer exists.
There’s a quieter benefit too. When you stop treating the software as the skill, the software stops being able to scare you. Release notes become weather, not news. You check the sky, grab the right coat, and get back to work. The forecast changes daily; the reasons people hire us don’t.
So we hold the tools with a loose grip these days and the fundamentals with a closed fist. The roster will turn over again by this time next year.
We’re planning on it.
