How I Use Craft

Sept. 11/26

For a few weeks this summer, Craft just sat there. I'd built it a home in my writing setup, given it a folder and a purpose — the Sunday Digest — and then I dropped the Digest. Craft didn't get deleted. It just went quiet, the way a shed does when the tool you built it for wears out and nothing replaces it. I walked past it in my app list the same way I used to walk past the old grain bin that hadn't held anything in years. Habit, not use.

I almost let it stay that way. There's a temptation, once a tool loses its one job, to decide it never had a real one — to write the whole thing off as a mistake instead of admitting it was just early. I was close to doing that with Craft. Would have, probably, if nothing else had shifted.

What changed it was watching how the rest of the system started talking to itself. Bear, xTiles, and now Claude reaching into all of it through something called MCP — that's the plumbing term, and it's not one I need to explain to get at what it means on the ground. What it means is that the same piece of writing stopped living in one place with one view of it. I could look at a post from Bear's angle, from xTiles' angle, from Claude sitting in the middle asking questions about both, noticing things I'd missed because I'd only ever looked from one seat. It's not unlike walking a field from the truck versus walking it on foot versus standing at the far fence line looking back toward the house — same ground every time, three different things noticed. Nothing changed about the dirt. What changed was how much of it I could actually see at once, and how much faster I could see it.

Once I had that, Craft stopped looking like a spare part. It looked like another vantage point I hadn't used yet. So I gave it real work — the Micro.blog posts, the Substack Notes, the Chronicles drafts, the stuff that's closer to the moment and looser than a pillar post. Bear keeps holding the load-bearing pieces, the ones that need the long view. Craft holds the ones that need to move fast and stay a little rough around the edges. Neither tool is doing the other's job. They're just finally looking at the same operation from different rows.

I don't think the lesson here is really about note-taking apps, though I use three or four of them now and probably always will. It's that I almost threw out a tool because it had lost its one narrow job, when the actual problem was that I hadn't given the whole operation enough eyes on it yet. You learn on a farm that you can't tell what a field needs from the truck window — you get out and walk it, and sometimes walk it twice, from two ends, before you trust what you saw. That's closer to what changed. Not the tool. The number of ways I had to look before deciding.

A field looks different depending on where you're standing, and so does a piece of writing. Once I had more places to stand, Craft had somewhere to be useful again. It didn't need me to defend it. It needed the rest of the operation to catch up to what it could actually do, and once it did, the choice made itself.

From the Field:

Six Colors — sixcolors.com

Daring Fireball — daringfireball.net

Consumer Reports (Tech) — consumerreports.org 

For deeper dives: MacSparky (paid membership) — macsparky.com 

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