🔨 When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

It's a classic cognitive bias - one that easily traps us. Comfort and habit create overconfidence, and we forget that not every problem is the same.

Example #1: "I used DynamoDB to store event data. It worked great, so I reused it for a new feature - but this time the data was more relational... and everything fell apart."

It sounds obvious in hindsight: you should use the right tool for the problem you're solving.

But the hardest part isn't picking the screwdriver - it's realizing that what you're facing is actually a screw!

This is where semantics come into play: what's the real meaning of the things I'm manipulating? Is this problem truly the same as another one I've solved before?

Example #2: a team once tried to build an autocomplete feature starting from a "select" component. Visually, they look similar. But semantically, they're two very different patterns - different behaviors, constraints, and user expectations. The result? Bugs everywhere.

One of the best ways to tell a screw from a nail is to understand the concepts you're working with more deeply (see the Seek the Truth mental model).

The better we name things, the more clearly we see the problem in front of us.