I remember sitting next to Bob, a legendary Facebook engineer who shipped Facebook Groups, at a company hackathon. I had an elaborate Vim setup with custom syntax highlighting for Hack, tmux over mosh, and fancy git aliases, expecting to learn from his workflow.

Bob opens his laptop and launches vanilla Sublime Text — no proper syntax highlighting, no live reloading, no debugger. He just sprinkles printf statements and waits for logs. I was shocked. How could someone so prolific use such basic tools?

Unsurprisingly, Bob won the hackathon that day. He was building buy/sell support in Groups, which later evolved into Facebook Marketplace. I was so focused on his editor choice that I missed what he was actually creating. His product taste and intuition mattered far more than his tooling.

I think about this story often when browsing productivity advice. New workflows promise transformation daily, but ultimately what matters is solving the right problems, not optimizing the process.