Opinionated shovel makers vs. opinionated diggers

There’s a cliché about gold rushes: don’t dig for gold, sell shovels.

Right now, AI feels a lot like that. Everyone is building agent harnesses, orchestrators, dev tooling, abstractions on top of abstractions. And to be clear, that stuff is useful. I use it myself. I have tools I genuinely like, and I appreciate people who have strong opinions about how those tools should work (you need to check out pi.dev)

But over the last few weeks I’ve realized something about myself: I’m not an opinionated shovel maker.

I’m an opinionated digger.

I like using good tools. I’ll compare them, choose between them, maybe tweak them a bit, maybe build a small extension here and there (again: pi is great for that). But I’m not deeply compelled by the question of how the shovel itself should be designed. That’s not where my taste is strongest.

Where I am opinionated is in building products. I like entering a domain I don’t know well, learning it fast, understanding the workflows and constraints, and then turning that understanding into software that feels sharper, simpler, and more useful than what already exists.

That’s the part I actually care about. Not the shovel itself, but what becomes possible when you use it well inside a real domain.

One of the subtle traps of the current AI moment is that it creates pressure to build whatever everyone else is building. If agents are hot, then surely I should be building agent frameworks. If developer tooling is exploding, then surely that must be the highest-leverage thing to do.

I don’t think that’s true. At least not for me.

What AI changes is not that I suddenly need to become a shovel maker. What it changes is the amount of leverage I have as a digger. It lets me move faster, learn domains quicker, prototype better workflows, and build more ambitious products as an individual than I could before.

That feels like the real opportunity.

Not becoming someone else because the market is excited about shovels. Becoming more fully the kind of builder I already am, with much better tools in hand.