Tools and the Shape of Us

A WhatsApp group I'm in had a long, energetic conversation last week about a new voice dictation tool. People were testing it, comparing notes, reporting back on what it did to Indian names. Someone's tool had turned Lakshminarayanan into three separate words, none of them a name. It was the good kind of group chat. Specific and useful.

Then someone ended it. "A tool is a tool. Choose one and keep moving."

You can see why it landed. That line has the weary authority of a person who has watched too many people mistake shopping for working.

As it happened, my electrician was at home that morning, fixing a switchboard. He does not spend an hour deciding which screwdriver best expresses his values. He does not worry whether a better one has arrived in the market. He opens his box, picks what he needs, and gets the work done.

I have been chewing on that line since. It is about sixty per cent right. The missing forty is where the interesting part lives.

The talk that nearly had no tools in it

I'd had almost the same conversation a few days earlier. A friend was preparing a talk on AI and had decided to leave tools out of it. They're ephemeral, she said. Talk about principles instead.

I thought that was a mistake. Tools cannot be the whole content of a talk. But there is nothing wrong with a few of them as a way in.

She kept a couple. Afterwards she told me those were the moments the room came alive and started engaging with the rest of it. The principles landed because people had something to hold on to along the way.

Two conversations, the same instinct, from people I rate. Tools are transient, so don't get stuck on them.

Both times I agreed. Both times I wanted to add something.

Even the hammer changes you

By now my electrician was driving a nail into a wooden panel to hide the wiring. I found myself watching his hands. Strong, dry, cracked at the knuckles. And completely at ease with wire, tape and screws.

Use a hammer for twenty years and it changes your hand. The grip callouses. The forearm thickens. You start judging a nail by sound rather than by sight. The tool does not sit outside you, politely waiting to be picked up. It works its way in.

There is an old line about this, usually credited to Marshall McLuhan. The words are actually John Culkin's, summarising him in 1967. We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.

It reads like the kind of saying people nod at and then forget. It shouldn't. It is the whole argument in nine words.

The tool does not sit outside you, politely waiting to be picked up. It works its way in.

Take the tool my WhatsApp group was arguing about. Voice typing.

When you type, writing and correcting happen in the same breath. You put down a phrase, your eye catches it, you go back, delete and try again before the thought is even finished. Typing rewards a particular kind of mind. Careful and silent.

Voice dictation changes that loop. Going back interrupts the flow, so you tend to keep moving. The sentences get longer, looser, closer to how you'd explain something to someone across a table than how you'd draft a note for the board.

And it isn't dictation in general that does this. The particular tool matters.

A tool that shows your words appearing as you speak hands the editing loop straight back to you. One that stays blank until you finish keeps you talking forwards. One that tidies up your false starts encourages you to stop policing yourself. One that transcribes you raw makes you more conscious of every sentence.

And then there is the thing the group had actually noticed. A tool that mangles Indian names may train you, within a week, to stop using them. You start choosing words the machine can hear. You write "the client" instead of writing his name.

That comes across as efficiency. It is also a piece of software quietly editing your vocabulary while you thank it for saving you time.

None of this happens on day one. None of it is destiny. It is a nudge, applied daily, for a year. Which is quite enough.

You only notice any of it by paying the tool the sort of attention the chat had just written off.

By then, my electrician had finished the switchboard, packed his tools and left.

Two ways to avoid the actual work

I sat there thinking about the two ends of the argument. One side saying choose one and move on. The other side happily comparing dictation tools for an hour.

Both ends can be hiding from something. That is what makes this so hard to settle.

Comparing tools feels like work. It has the shape of diligence. You are researching, evaluating, weighing options. There is a spreadsheet. And you can do it for a fortnight without writing a single page, closing a single deal, or having the difficult conversation you have been putting off since March. The new tool is always more exciting than the real problem, because the real problem is hard and the tool is only new.

The other end is just as comfortable. Sticking with what you know feels like discipline. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is also the simple pleasure of being good at something. Your familiar tool makes you feel capable. The new one would make you a beginner again, and that is not a small thing to volunteer for.

So both camps can get to feel virtuous. One is busy. The other is disciplined. Neither may be doing the work.

Three things I actually do

Do I spend too much time discussing tools? Or do I pick one and hold on? I have no formula. I have three habits, and they have kept me from leaning too far either way.

One. Sort the tool before you think about it.

Two questions, borrowed from Geoffrey Moore, who wrote them for boardrooms and never imagined anyone using them at a kitchen table on a Sunday morning.

Does this tool change what I produce, or does everyone have it? And would my week stop without it, or is it merely pleasant?

Email and calendar sit in the box marked "Decide once, then stop." If you are still comparing calendar apps in 2026, the calendar is not your problem.

Your main writing tool, your notes, the AI you actually think with: these change what you produce and you use them every day. This is the box that earns real study.

Experiment where being wrong costs you an afternoon. And the productivity app of the month is not owed an opinion.

Jeff Bezos has a related test that saves a lot of agonising. Some doors are one-way. Walk through and you cannot walk back, so take your time. Most doors are two-way. You can go back through them.

Trying a dictation app for a week is a two-way door. Moving eight years of notes into a new system is not.

Two. Follow people who are properly obsessed.

Somewhere out there is a person who has thought about note-taking for six years and holds opinions on it that would empty a dinner table. Find them. Find the one for voice typing. The one for CRMs. The one who has actually run the thing you are considering, for eighteen months, under pressure.

Not the people who review everything. The people who use one thing deeply and can tell you where it breaks. A reviewer will tell you a dictation tool is accurate. Someone who has lived inside it for a year will tell you what it did to the way they work, and whether that turned out to be a gift or a problem.

Then read two of them against each other. One enthusiast is a fan. Two who disagree are an education. When they agree on a weakness, believe it. When they disagree, you have found the part that depends on how you work, which is the part you would have had to test yourself anyway.

This is the cheap bit. Scanning costs almost nothing. Switching is what costs.

Three. Keep the leaving separate from the joining.

This one I take from the late Chandramouli Venkatesan, who was writing about jobs.

His point was that the decision to leave and the decision about where to go must be made separately. If the appeal of the new place is doing the work of justifying your exit, you have not reasoned about leaving at all. You have been dazzled.

Same with tools. Before you move, ask whether you would still be leaving if the new thing did not exist. Name the gap. What is your current tool failing to do that you actually need?

If you can name what is broken, go. If the only answer is that the other one looks lovely, you are redecorating.

The one everyone wants to talk about

Which brings us to AI, where the same mistake is being made at scale and at some expense.

The question worth asking of any of these tools is not whether it is impressive. It is which loop it has quietly removed.

A coding assistant can produce the function before you have worked through every edge case. It can remove a pause in which a programmer might otherwise have caught a bad assumption. Good programmers learn to put that scrutiny back in deliberately, reading generated code as though a stranger wrote it.

A drafting tool hands you a decent paragraph in seconds. It can remove the blank page, which for many writers is where part of the thinking used to happen. If the tool removes that friction, the thinking has to happen somewhere else—in the prompt, the conversation, or the editing.

A summariser gives you the conclusions of a forty-page report and removes the path the author took to get there. Sometimes that path was padding. Sometimes it was the argument. The tool presents both with the same confidence.

That is the thing to watch. Every useful tool removes friction. But not all friction was waste. Some of it was where judgment formed, assumptions surfaced, and thinking happened.

Every useful tool removes friction. But not all friction was waste.

None of this makes these tools good or bad. It makes them tools. Things that shape you back the moment you use them well enough to stop noticing.

Back to the group chat

So, to whoever ended that thread. You were right that a tool is a tool. You were right that no one should spend a week comparing them.

And the hour before your message was not wasted. People were working out what a new way of speaking does to what they write. That is not shopping. That is the job.

Look often and cheaply. Switch rarely, and for a reason you can say out loud. And every so often, check which of the two comfortable positions you have drifted into.

Busy with tools, or safe from them.