The best AI tools are boring

Jarred Sumner announced that Claude Code now ships Bun rewritten in Rust. Simon Willison confirmed it by finding .rs files in the binary. The result: startup got 10% faster on Linux. Sumner's comment: "Boring is good."

That sentence is worth sitting with.

A massive engineering effort — rewriting a JavaScript runtime in Rust, shipping it to millions of devices — and the best compliment you can give it is that almost nobody noticed. No blog post campaign. No new UI. No press release about "paradigm-shifting runtime optimization." Just a faster startup time that blended into the background.

This is the opposite of the behavior Nik Suresh documents in AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making. Executives writing AI strategies for $2B companies when they have never used ChatGPT. Engineers rewriting Go repos in Zig just to show activity on a token leaderboard. Vendors trapped in a game where honesty about AI capabilities could cost them enterprise contracts.

The most effective AI use I see as a solo builder is boring. It does not replace judgment. It makes the mechanical parts faster so judgment has room to operate. I wrote about this in The Founder Floor — the shift from writing everything yourself to reviewing what the machine produces and applying taste at the gate.

The boring test

I now have a simple test for any AI tool I consider adding to my stack:

If this tool disappeared tomorrow, would I genuinely be slower — or would I just have to revert to a slightly more manual process?

If the answer is the latter, the tool is not earning its keep. The best AI tools are the ones that handle a specific, well-defined job that I do not want to think about. Translating one format to another. Running a bounded analysis. Generating the first pass of something I will edit anyway.

The worst AI tools are the ones that make me feel productive without producing anything durable. Endless chat threads. Dashboard widgets that measure "AI activity." Token leaderboards. These are status signals, not tools.

What this means for solo builders

For solo builders and small teams, the boring AI advantage is real. You do not have the time to chase every new model release or restructure your workflow around the latest agent framework. What you have is a specific set of problems that need solving, and a limited number of hours to solve them.

The AI tool that matters is the one that disappears into your workflow. The one you forget is running until you notice you shipped faster than expected.

This is hard to hear if you are surrounded by hype. Everyone is posting their Codex stats, comparing agent benchmarks, sharing the latest prompt tricks. It creates a pressure to perform AI adoption rather than actually benefiting from it.

Resist that pressure. The engineers at Claude Code who shipped Bun in Rust did not get a dopamine hit from a leaderboard. They got a faster binary and a comment that nobody noticed. That is the real win.

The boring future

I expect the best AI tools of 2027 to be even more invisible. They will not have their own UI. They will not require a separate subscription. They will be embedded in the tools you already use, handling the work you do not want to do, and getting out of the way.

The AI tools that survive will be the ones that make themselves forgotten.