Tools I Built But Haven’t Used Lately

I have a tendency to build tools quickly, wire them up, and then move on to the next challenge. The result is a drawer full of working systems that don’t get the daily attention they deserve. They’re not broken—they’re just underused. And the reason is almost always the same: I didn’t bridge the gap between the experiment and the habit.

Some of these tools are powerful. Dashboards that summarize projects. JSON-to-Issue pipelines that turn ideas into GitHub tasks. Lightweight booking flows I spun up in a weekend. Reporting templates that could save me hours if I ran them consistently. Each one proves a point: I can solve the problem. But proving the point isn’t the same as changing my behavior.

When I reflect on it, the issue isn’t technical debt—it’s attention debt. Without a ritual around these tools, they gather dust. I default to scratchpads, quick chats, or memory instead of letting the tools carry the load. The irony is that the more of these systems I spin up, the less likely I am to commit fully to any one of them.

That doesn’t mean they’re wasted. They act as scaffolding, prototypes, and reminders of what’s possible. They also give me confidence: when the time comes to operationalize something, I already have code, patterns, and a mental library of solutions to pull from. They’re latent assets.

The goal going forward is less about inventing new tools and more about using the ones I already have. If I can fold them into daily practice—make them the first thing I reach for instead of the last—they’ll stop being artifacts of experiments and start being the backbone of my work. That’s the shift I’m aiming for.