There's a bias in tech toward platforms. Toward scale. Toward building the thing that does everything for everyone. I understand the economics of this, but I think it produces worse tools and less satisfying work.
I keep coming back to small tools.
A small tool does one thing well. It has a clear boundary. You can understand the entire thing — its purpose, its interface, its limitations — in a few minutes.
Examples from the physical world: a pocket knife, a metronome, a field notebook. Examples from software: a good timer app, a focused text editor, a single-purpose CLI utility.
Small doesn't mean simple. A well-made pocket knife is a marvel of engineering. But it doesn't try to also be a flashlight and a compass and a phone charger.
When you build a small tool, you can hold the entire thing in your head. You can make every decision deliberately. You can ship it, use it yourself, and know whether it's good.
There's no product committee. No feature roadmap stretching to the horizon. No analytics dashboard telling you that engagement is down 3% and you need to add push notifications.
You just build the thing, and then you use the thing.
Small tools respect your attention. They don't try to become your whole workflow. They don't send you notifications. They don't have a social feed.
When I open NØTE to record something, that's all I can do — record. And that constraint is the feature. It keeps me present. It keeps the tool useful.
Small tools work best when they compose. Unix pipes. MIDI connections. File systems. The web itself. When tools have clean boundaries and standard interfaces, you can combine them in ways no platform designer anticipated.
I think the best personal software stack looks less like one big app and more like a curated collection of small, focused instruments — each doing one thing exceptionally well.
If you've never built a small tool for yourself, I'd encourage you to try it. Pick something you do regularly. Build the simplest possible version that serves your actual workflow. Skip the features you think you might need. Ship it for an audience of one.
You might be surprised how satisfying it is.