On slow tools

A tool that takes a moment to respond is not necessarily a worse tool. Some of the best ones make you wait on purpose.

The enlarger in our darkroom takes about eleven seconds to warm up. For years this felt like a defect. It is, in fact, the only reliable pause in the whole process — long enough to look at the negative again and change your mind.

Software rarely gives you that. Everything is instant, and so every decision is instant too. We have started adding small, deliberate delays to our own internal tools: a confirmation that appears half a second late, a batch job that runs on the hour rather than on the keystroke. The complaints stopped after about a week.

None of this is an argument for slowness as a virtue. It is an argument for putting the pause where the thinking should happen.