Productivity ≠ Understanding.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how our industry is evolving — and honestly, it’s a strange place to be in.

We’re living in a time where companies expect every role to rely on a stack of “latest” tools that promise rapid results, yet no one stops to ask whether those results are deeply understood or even meaningful in the long-term. Productivity has become a metric, not a mindset.

What worries me is this: Tools are starting to replace thinking, not just tasks.

Yes, AI helps remove redundant work — and I’m all for that. But when decisions are made without context, oversight, or systems thinking, the consequences ripple across the entire product or service. You get fast output, but you lose clarity, nuance, and direction.

And on top of that, workers today end up paying for many of these tools personally — tools we’re pressured to use just to keep up. We spend our own hard-earned money to produce work faster, but the value of that work gets credited to “tool efficiency,” not human expertise.

Somewhere along the way, we started optimizing speed instead of understanding. “Ship fast” became more important than “think deeply.” And that’s a loss — not just for workers, but for the product itself.

I still believe that vision, critical thinking, and craftsmanship matter more today than ever. Tools should amplify our thinking, not replace it. And tools should make us more human, not more rushed.

Just sharing this because a lot of us feel this shift but rarely talk about it. Curious to hear how others are navigating this tool-heavy, AI-driven era — especially while trying to maintain a thoughtful, long-term approach to building meaningful work.