The Vertigo of AI: From Deep Craft to Anxious Generality

When did we go from specializing in two or three programs — with all their tools: Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. — to exploring our creativity, to chasing hundreds of programs with barely two or three functions each?

Is this an expansion of our creativity or a limitation? And where does our toolkit even live now?

The age of deep mastery

Let's compare it to an artisan or a carpenter. Mastery is built through repetition and practice, yes — but also through the intimate use of one's tools. Day after day, applying a technique with a slightly different tool, until the hand knows what the head can barely articulate.

For me, that was part of the designer's exercise. Knowing the tools is what allowed you to reach mastery. And "knowing" them didn't mean reading the manual. It meant spending hundreds of hours inside Photoshop, getting lost in layers, discovering a shortcut by accident, understanding why –5 kerning reads better than 0.

Here I should get ahead of a fair objection: someone will say that 1995 Photoshop isn't 2026 Photoshop. Adobe ships major releases every year, and the tool from thirty years ago is barely recognizable now. That's true. But the principle holds: mastery is built on a stable set of tools, not on constant novelty. The yearly update is something you absorb in an afternoon if you know the bones of the software. The new app you tried yesterday didn't leave you muscle. It left you screenshots in a folder called "to explore."

Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman, puts it without sentimentality: mastery changes what the content of repetition is, not whether you repeat (Sennett, 2008). The person who repeats with judgment sees, on the hundredth repetition, what the beginner can't see on the first.

The age of vertigo

This changed over time. We moved from specialty to generality. And this generality, today, changes every day.

A couple of years ago it was enough to follow the big releases of the software houses and run a small update to absorb the new features. Now there's a new app every day, sold as "easier," "more efficient," "more realistic." And if we look at it honestly, that proliferation actually shrinks our creative potential — it doesn't expand it.

This isn't only intuition. A RingCentral survey of 2,000 knowledge workers found that 7 out of 10 lose up to an hour a day just switching between applications (IBM / CITE Research, 2024). Productiv estimates that roughly 50% of SaaS licenses go underused (Productiv, 2024). In industry jargon they call it SaaS sprawl. I call it vertigo: the looped sensation of missing out.

As I mentioned in another piece of this series, these new technologies are tools that let us break limits — and that's exactly where a professional can stand out by having prior knowledge of the tools and of what can be done with them, how to improve a workflow, how to create in media or fields that, by knowledge or capability, were impossible before. But you don't get that edge by testing 40 apps a year. You get it by mastering a few, very well.

The reframe: the question before the click

Based on that principle, when the anxiety to be "up to date" with the latest or "best" tools appears, step back.

Any tool can work. The principle is the same and it's the most important one:

• What is my objective?
• What do I want to achieve?
• What is the expected outcome?

That lets you build a roadmap, and inside that roadmap, identify which tool is actually the best — in cost, in time-efficiency, in volume, in quality, in whatever you've defined as your criterion.

The exercise is old. The difference is that in 2026, skipping it has you chasing a launch every 48 hours.

A concrete, current example

The professional who is best at AI and design this year isn't the one who tested 40 new applications. It's the one who mastered four — say, Figma, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT — and who understands when to use each. They know when to prototype in Figma and when to write straight into code. They know when to ask Claude for a brief and when not to. They have a flow, not a tab full of open apps.

That's what a good client sees when they hire someone today. Not your logo list. Your judgment about when to use what.

The four-tool discipline

My operational recommendation, drawn more from practice than from theory:

• Pick four tools that cover your value chain. One for thinking, one for designing, one for producing, one for communicating.
• Give them six months without jumping ship. The first month you'll feel limited. By the third, you'll see things you couldn't see before.
• Test new things — but as an exercise, not as adoption. One afternoon a month to look at what shipped. Not three hours a day.
• Return to the objective every time the anxiety appears. Is this getting me closer to what I want to build, or is it distracting me?

You don't need to know 100 tools. You need to know four very well. And, above all, you need to know what for.

Vertigo isn't cured by looking at more. It's cured by choosing.