Someone's trying to chop down a tree in their yard. You're out on a walk, and feeling neighborly, so you stop to watch, and you notice something: their axe is barely making a dent, and they're making little to no progress on getting through a thick trunk.

"Mornin' neighbor," you pipe up pluckily, "I was watching you, and, I couldn't help noticing, you got a really dull axe there. If you stop and sharpen it, you'll be having a much better time. Get that tree chopped down in no time."

Your neighbor looks at you with a mix of surprise, anguish and anger. "I need to get this tree chopped down, right away! I don't have time to stop and work on my axe."

Oh.

I imagine President Lincoln having a similar experience, and using it as the catalyst for his quote (as commonly attributed to him) "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."

This all seems relevant today, in the middle of 2025, with software development tools having achieved what feels to me like a step change at least equivalent to IDEs or Stack. Yet when I talk to web software engineers and other people who do software development for a living, they often tell me they're too busy doing their work to learn about them...