It doesn’t matter how good a tool is; the bandwidth of the brain is always the plateau you eventually hit. You can buy a faster app, adopt a sharper framework, learn a more elegant notation — and still meet the same ceiling, because the bottleneck was never the tool. It was the mind holding it.
Your mind is the ultimate tool. It does come with real limitations: it decays — it needs repetition to maintain what it holds — and it is inconsistent, a side effect of its plasticity; it morphs a little every time you use it (Hebb’s Law). Those are not flaws you can engineer away. And yet, for all of that, it remains the truest form of your thought — because it is your thought. No external tool can represent an idea more faithfully than the mind that grew it.
So I try to hold tools loosely. Every adoption is an experiment, not a commitment. I want to stay ready to ditch a tool, or grow out of it, the moment it stops serving the thinking underneath. A tool you cannot abandon has quietly become a cage.
The way out, when I feel myself getting attached, is to boil the tool down to first principles — the few core functions it actually performs — and weigh those against my own real workflows. Not the marketing, not what the tool could do; only what I actually need it to do. Adopt the function; stay free of the tool. (A thread I first picked up in a friend’s thinking.)