Tools That Think With You
I’ve been thinking a lot about what separates good tools from great ones. Not in terms of features or polish, but something more fundamental about how they interact with your thinking.
The Problem with Most Tools
Most software tools are passive. They wait for instructions and execute them. This is fine for many tasks—I don’t need my text editor to have opinions about my prose.
But for creative work, this passivity can be limiting. The best creative partnerships involve some form of dialogue, push and pull, suggestion and response.
What “Thinking With” Means
The tools I keep returning to share some characteristics:
They Show You What’s Possible
Not through documentation or tutorials, but through the interface itself. The tool surfaces capabilities at relevant moments.
They Have Reasonable Defaults
You can start creating immediately. The tool has made good assumptions so you don’t have to configure everything before beginning.
They Respond to Context
The tool adapts to what you’re doing. Features relevant to your current task become more prominent while others recede.
They Maintain History
Not just undo/redo, but a sense of the journey. You can explore branches, compare approaches, understand how you got here.
The AI Question
This is why I’m cautiously optimistic about AI tools for creative work. Not because they’ll do the work for us, but because they might finally give us tools that can genuinely participate in the creative process.
The key word is “participate”—not lead, not replace, but collaborate. That’s a hard balance to strike, but some tools are starting to get it right.
What I’m Watching
A few approaches that feel promising:
- Suggestion over automation - Tools that offer options rather than making decisions
- Transparent reasoning - Being able to understand why a tool suggested something
- Graceful override - Easy to accept, modify, or reject suggestions without disrupting flow
The best creative tools don’t just amplify what we can do—they expand how we think about what’s possible.