People tell me I ship faster these days.

At first I happily read it as improving skill. But examined honestly, I don't write better code than before, and my algorithms haven't grown.

One thing changed. The number of times I refuse to leave a question unanswered.

Questions used to have a price

Curiosity carried a unit cost.

When something snagged, I would search, read the docs, and close the tab half-understanding. Digging further costs time. So most of it went to the "read later" folder, and later never came.

Now I ask the moment I'm curious. The answer raises another question, and I ask again. This chain running three or four levels deep is exactly where the difference lives.

One search is shallow. But go down into why it was designed that way, what that approach costs, whether it even fits our situation, and it stops being a search.

Once the price disappeared, the curiosity I already had began converting directly into work.

Questions become projects

Looking back, everything I built this year started with a question rather than a technology.

Why do I keep dropping things while running several projects at once. Would we actually use a ledger if I built one for us. All these markdown files have piled up, so which ones can I delete. If there's no reviewer, does review simply never happen.

Not one of them began with wanting to try some technology. They were all things that chafed in daily life or work, and now I could pursue them immediately.

So what is left

A slightly cold question follows.

If the price of a question has fallen to nearly zero for everyone, where does the difference between people come from now?

High-grade information existed before too. Official docs, source code, design discussions — access was never blocked. What was blocked was the cost of digesting it, and with that cost lowered, only two things seem to remain.

What you are curious about. And how quickly you turn curiosity into an experiment.

The first is closer to taste, the second closer to habit. Neither is something a tool does for you.

What I guard against

Answers gained quickly are forgotten quickly.

So whatever I learned by asking that actually got used in a project, I rewrite as my own document. Knowledge not yet phrased in my own words isn't mine yet.

What I watch more carefully is judgment. Because asking got easy, I try not to hand over deciding as well. Even with the answer in hand, choosing whether it fits our situation is mine, and that muscle still only grows through direct collision.

Knowing quickly and knowing deeply are different things. I keep confirming that the first getting easier doesn't drag the second along behind it.

And so

I didn't become a better developer.

I was curious, and the era arrived where that curiosity pays. That's all of it.

Though the sentence reads another way, too. What better tools reveal isn't ability. It's what a person was curious about all along.

We seem to have entered a time when what you want to build says more about you than what you can build.