tools that get out of the way

The best tools are the ones you stop thinking about. They become invisible infrastructure — reliable enough that your attention stays on the work, not the tooling.

I keep coming back to Go for the same reason I keep coming back to plain text files: they are predictable. A Go binary does what it says. A markdown file is readable in any editor on any machine. There is no dependency hell. There are no breaking changes in a .md file.

Hugo is like this. You write markdown. You run a command. You get HTML. The feedback loop is instantaneous. No webpack config, no node_modules black hole, no hot module replacement that only works half the time.

This isn’t an argument against complexity — some problems genuinely require it. But most personal sites don’t. Most blogs don’t. The complexity is usually a sign that someone chose a tool designed for a different problem entirely.

Pick the boring thing. Ship the work.