Opinionated Shovel Makers vs. Opinionated Diggers

Last updated: April 14, 2026

Lukas Kawerau’s post, "Opinionated shovel makers vs. opinionated diggers", gave language to something I’ve been feeling for a while.

AI tooling creates a strong pull toward shovel-making: orchestrators, frameworks, meta-tools, abstractions over abstractions. Some of that is genuinely useful. I use those tools every day.

But most days I care more about the dig site than the shovel. I care about the product, the domain, and whether the software is actually useful to someone.

My read

I’m mostly an opinionated digger.

I did not build bosun and the surrounding harness because I wanted to spend my life tuning orchestrators. I built it because my actual work kept breaking in predictable ways: context would evaporate between sessions, quality would drift, and I would keep re-explaining the same constraints.

So I treat shovel-making as infrastructure work in service of product work. Not the destination.

The two failure modes

There are two easy ways to get this wrong:

never build tools, then pay the same friction tax forever;
only build tools, and quietly stop shipping domain outcomes.

The middle path is usually better: build the minimum shovel that removes recurring pain, then go back to digging.

That is basically Start Manual, Automate Later stated in different words.

The filter I use

Before I build new harness infrastructure, I ask three questions:

Is this pain recurring?
If fixed, will it compound across sessions/agents?
Can I timebox the implementation?

If the answer is yes to all three, I build the shovel. If not, I keep digging.

This one filter prevents a lot of tool-builder rabbit holes.

Where this lands

I agree with Lukas on the core point: AI increases leverage for builders who already know what they want to build.

For me the practical stance is:

stay anchored to product/domain outcomes,
invest in harness pieces only when they clearly compound,
avoid identity lock-in around either camp.

So the short version is: build shovels in service of digging, not instead of it.