10 July, 2025 – 5 min read

The novelty fallacy: An argument for mastery

Written by Shaun Jenkins

In software development, there’s a constant pressure to use the latest tech. There’s a feeling that if you’re not using the newest framework or tool, you’re already falling behind. I’ve come to think that this isn’t always true. In fact, sometimes it’s the opposite that leads to better work.

You don’t have to use the very latest technology to create great experiences for people. I’d even argue that by not using the newest thing, you can often build something better. You get to spend the time you would have invested in learning a new, unstable tool on actually improving the user experience and honing your craft. This doesn’t mean you should stand still and never learn anything new. But being in a constant state of flux, always chasing the next new thing, isn’t a good way to build solid, reliable products.

You can see examples of this principle, where mature tech is used to create some of the best experiences, in other creative industries.

Take the video game giant Nintendo. Their history is filled with examples of prioritising a novel idea over using the latest tech. The original Game Boy, when it was released in 1989, essentially took off-the-shelf tech to create something new; colour LCDs were around back then, but Nintendo chose the simpler, cheaper, more reliable green-and-grey screen. You see this pattern again and again: the two screens of the DS, the motion controls of the Wii – machines that focused on innovation in how you play, not pursuing the latest tech. The Switch follows a similar approach. It’s essentially an iteration of ideas Nintendo was exploring with the earlier Wii U and its controller-with-a-screen. They took that concept, refined it and created one of the most successful consoles ever.

This all comes back to the philosophy of the late Gunpei Yokoi, the original designer of the Game Boy, who spoke of Lateral Thinking with Seasoned Technology: finding radical, new ways to use mature, well-understood tech, rather than simply chasing the most powerful components.

This type of approach isn’t confined to video games. You see the same principle at work in film music with the legendary composer John Williams. In the Music By John Williams documentary, he mentions feeling he was too old to re-tool, so he continues to write his music the old-school way: with pencil and paper, composing at a piano.

Contrast that with the incredibly advanced setups of many modern composers, with their digital audio workstations, virtual instruments and MIDI keyboards. Yet anyone who’s felt the magic of the music from Star Wars, Jurassic Park, or Harry Potter knows the result is timeless. Williams’ ability to create such powerful, enduring work clearly doesn’t come from having the newest tools; it comes from his absolute mastery of his craft, using the familiar ones he knows inside and out.

This idea feels particularly relevant when you look at the world of front-end development. That whole space seems locked in a mindset where something new has to come along every couple of years and be hailed as the next big thing. A new framework or tool appears, often promising to solve all the old problems in a revolutionary way. There’s a lot of hype, and developers can feel an intense pressure to jump on board just so they don’t feel left behind.

But often, after the initial excitement fades, you find that this new tool isn’t radically better than what came before, it’s just different. It solves many of the same problems that were already perfectly solvable with the established, seasoned technologies we already have. It just asks you to solve them in a slightly different way, forcing teams to spend huge amounts of time re-learning and re-building things that, fundamentally, already worked perfectly well.

I often think about all that collective time and energy spent migrating from one next big thing to another. What if that same energy was instead invested in truly mastering the powerful tools we already have? Imagine taking an existing, mature framework and pushing it to its creative limits to build novel user experiences. That feels like a much better way to apply our craft – using what’s proven and well-understood to create something genuinely new and delightful for the user, rather than just building the same old things with a new and unfamiliar set of tools.

Adopting this way of thinking changes how you approach other parts of development. It encourages you to stand on your own shoulders – to build your own reusable functions, methods and classes that become your seasoned technology over time. You start thinking about the long-term, building things that can stand the test of time, because you’re not planning to throw them away for the next new thing in six months.

This focus on robust, known tools also frees you up to concentrate on what really matters to the user. You can focus on performance, which trumps superfluous stuff every day of the week. People are trying to get things done; they want things fast and don’t want to sit around waiting for some irrelevant animation to finish. You have more time to think about accessibility, which often benefits everyone with things like bigger buttons or better use of negative space. You can spend your energy tackling the disorienting effects of bad web design, because creative solutions nearly always trump overtly technical ones.

Ultimately, this way of thinking is about having a clear vision you want to realise. It gives you the confidence to be bold. And when you’re passionate about what you’re creating, you have the morale to push through when curveballs come your way. It encourages a mindset where you negotiate and compromise on many things, but never on the actual quality of the final product.

– Shaun

I've been building tech for over 11 years. Made ONFORM and Campaign Pro as owner of Going Bold. Lead the team behind the FAW ecosystem.