The Water I’m In
On Tools, Momentum, and Doing the Work That’s Actually in Front of You
I started my career on a mainframe.
Black background. Green text.
No mouse. No windows. No debate.
I was working in CICS, and the interface was the system. You learned the commands or you didn’t work. There was no abstraction layer to soften the experience. Everything was text, and everything mattered. At the time, it didn’t feel austere. It felt normal.
Later, when I moved to SunOS, the idea of windows felt almost magical. Not because they were colorful, but because they allowed information to coexist. You could see state instead of holding it all in your head. Multiple processes could be visible at once. The system stopped competing with itself for attention.
That shift changed how I thought about work.
In the early 1990s, I was certain I would never have a computer in my home. Work lived at work. Then I bought one anyway. It ran Windows 3.1. Suddenly there were fonts, icons, colors, and menus. Program Manager. File Manager. Things were labeled. Spatial. Approachable.
It wasn’t that it made me more productive. It made computing feel like it had crossed a boundary into everyday life.
Not long after, I chose text again. Deliberately.
I spent years in vi. I used whatever editor was closest to the system I was working in. I rarely had Visual Studio installed on my machine. It wasn’t a rejection of graphical tools. It was a preference for not fighting the environment. Text was fast. Portable. Predictable. It stayed out of the way.
The assumption people sometimes make is that choosing text means you never learned the other tools. For me, it was the opposite. It was about fluency and control, not nostalgia.
For a long time, that was enough.
Eventually, I started using Visual Studio Code. I didn’t rush to it. I didn’t adopt it because it was popular. I adopted it because it solved a problem I was feeling more acutely as my work changed.
VS Code let me hold context in one place. My editor. A terminal. My folders. Experiments. Notes. Now, even my thinking partners. I could see the shape of the work without constantly switching surfaces.
It wasn’t flashy.
It was stabilizing.
As my work has shifted, I’ve become more aware of how quickly tooling momentum can change.
Over the past few months, I’ve felt that familiar sense of motion again. New capabilities showing up quickly. New workflows taking shape. Copilot CLI, in particular, is getting a lot of positive attention, and for good reason. There’s real momentum there.
Watching that unfold brings back a recognizable feeling. Not resistance. Not dismissal. Just the quiet awareness that the center of gravity is shifting, and that I’m standing somewhere slightly adjacent to where the excitement currently lives.
Once more, it feels like I missed the boat.
The thing that’s easy to miss is that the meaning of these tools has changed, even if the feeling hasn’t.
Early command‑line work was necessity. Early graphical interfaces were access. Later, the command line became a marker of mastery. Today’s tools are hybrids. Terminals live inside editors. Editors invoke agents. Automation and interaction coexist.
Treating this as a binary misses how modern work actually happens.
Much of the work I care about now is not a single linear task that can be scripted end‑to‑end. It’s investigative. Iterative. It requires holding partial results, anomalies, and competing hypotheses at the same time. The cost isn’t typing commands. The cost is losing orientation.
In that kind of work, visibility isn’t decoration.
It’s structure.
Right now, the work I care about benefits from integration. From seeing state. From staying oriented. That’s not a step backward. It’s a reflection of where the work actually lives.
Maybe I didn’t miss the boat.
Maybe I just chose the one that matched the water I’m in, and the work I’m actually doing.
Alison + Wiggins