The Spatula Has Opinions

Grocery list. Calendar. The chisels hanging on the pegboard in size order, because a woodworker will count her tools twice before breakfast.

We’re good at inventory. We take stock of the food, the trips, the money, the sharp things in the garage.

The drawer by the stove never gets counted.

There’s a spatula in mine with a thin bending blade, the kind that slides under an egg like it’s apologizing. I’ve used it on breakfast sausages for years. It is terrible at breakfast sausages. Not terrible in a way that announces itself, though. It just quietly taught me the job was flipping, when the job was rolling, and I went along with it because the sausages came out mostly fine and the pan never complained.

Every tool carries an opinion about what the work is.

Use one long enough and you adopt the opinion without noticing.

It stays invisible because a tool that flat out failed would have been thrown away the first week. The ones that reshape you are the ones that perform adequately at a job they quietly rewrote.

I’m writing this with an AI, so let me say the uncomfortable part plainly. It is extraordinary at producing, and it has an opinion, and the opinion is that thinking is something you finish. Sitting with a half-formed idea for three days until it goes strange on you is not a feature it offers. It was trained on what everybody has already said, which means it arrives at the consensus faster than any human alive… and consensus arriving fast still feels an awful lot like insight. Spectacular tool for a hundred jobs. Thinking differently than your competition is not one of them, unless you bring the different part yourself.

There’s a service I pay for at the bar that I could build myself in a weekend. The invoice isn’t what bothers me. It’s that somewhere in there I stopped asking what the job actually was and started doing what its screens wanted, in the order they wanted it. When you’re building something you might hand to somebody else someday, every subscription sitting on the books is an opinion a stranger gets to read back to you.

This is most of why companies in the same category sound alike. It isn’t laziness. They bought the same six tools, those tools only ask certain questions, and a question you’re never prompted to ask is a question you will not answer. Your stack is your positioning whether you meant it that way or not. Nobody has ever found an original position inside the same machine everyone else is running.

The tool you hand your team is a sentence about what you think their job is. Give somebody a queue and you’ve told them the work is closing tickets. They’ll believe you. They’ll get very good at it. (And then you’ll sit in a meeting wondering why nobody brings you anything you didn’t ask for.)

The inventory worth taking isn’t of the tools. It’s of the opinions you’ve been carrying around that you never actually agreed to.

Stay Positive & Probably Time To Take That Inventory