A computer science professor Paul Cantrell, on Mastodon:

Creative work keeps taking roughly the same amount of human labor / attention / care, even as new technologies accelerate or remove things that used to take time.

This is because creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem; process is not just the means of producing output, but rather a labor vessel that holds the near-invisible work that is truly important.

One can feel the care that goes into creative work without being aware of that work, or even being aware that work of that type exists at all. This feeling is approximate, loose, vague, but cumulative and eventually all-important; work with no care behind it wears thin and tends to fade as people live with it over time.

This really resonated with me.

Elsewhere, Ginger Bill, in a recent – meandering, but thought-provoking – essay titled “Good tools are invisible”:

I constantly see some people praise it not for what actually makes it good, but by taking the things it’s bad at and turning them into a puzzle to have “fun” solving.

I’ve had people tell me how “fun” it was to build a macro to handle some one-off text-refactoring problem. But when I looked at what they were doing and how long it took, my honest reaction was: I could have done that in Sublime in a minute with multiple cursors, or just written a quick script. […]

That’s what I mean by “invisible tools”. When you’re proficient with your editor of choice—whatever it is—it disappears into the background. But the moment it cannot handle something easily, it stops being invisible. What baffles me is that so many people treat that friction—the effort of working around a tool’s limitations—as the “fun” part, and then advertise it as evidence that the tool is great. […]

The text-editor-macro anecdote I mentioned is really about a gap between feeling productive versus being productive. There’s a sensation of cleverness that comes from solving a fiddly problem, and it’s easy to mistake that feeling for actual output. A tool that makes hard things feel heroic and clever feel like an achievement can register as “powerful” while quietly being slow. The honest test isn’t how engaged or clever you felt, it’s wall-clock time and how many mistakes you made getting there.

This I had more of a mixed reaction to.

I think it’s necessary to expect from tools to get out of the way, but there’s also nothing wrong with having fun with them.

My simple go-to example is this: When writing code, I sometimes use Find & Replace All, and am done within a few keystrokes. But sometimes, I press Find and then replace one at a time, jumping methodically through the file, and seeing each string in situ before changing it. I know the tool could do it all for me. I know I could be more efficient. But this intentional slowing down allows me to refamiliarize myself with the code, visit its forgotten nooks and crannies, and make sure I understand where and how the thing I’m changing is actually used.

The editor I use allows me to not be efficient when I choose not to be. In my work, flow operates at different speeds; a good tool understands that and doesn’t force me into a particular one.

I think ultimately indeed, the tool does need to disappear, and make you be in charge of whatever speed you want to operate at, and how much friction or difficulty you choose to face (do you bump the lamp or not?). But it’s not as simple as always “reducing wall-clock time and mistakes.” Like Cantrell says above: Creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem.