Every company has snowflakes. Each one unique, delicate, and guaranteed to melt under pressure.

They accumulate quietly: the one-off script someone runs before every deploy, the spreadsheet with its own arcane formula logic, the onboarding flow that requires five Slack DMs to complete. Over time, those snowflake processes pile up into a blizzard of operational friction.

Toolsmiths are the ones who melt them.

They’re not the loudest people in the room. You won’t see them pitching product roadmaps or leading all-hands. But they build the quiet infrastructure that keeps a company from freezing in place. A toolsmith sees repetition and decides it shouldn’t exist. They build a small script, an automation, a workflow, and suddenly something that was fragile becomes reusable. That’s the kind of leverage that scales an organization, yet it’s often invisible.

From Infrastructure to Everywhere

The idea of codifying process isn’t new. The DevOps movement was built on it. Chef, Ansible, and later Terraform turned one-off, bespoke configurations into repeatable, version-controlled artifacts. Infrastructure stopped being artisanal; it became declarative.

But somewhere along the way, the rest of the business got left behind. Marketing teams still handcraft campaigns in silos. Support teams dig through logs by memory. BI teams spend days reconciling slightly different versions of the truth in spreadsheets. Every team has its own snowflakes, and very few have the tools (or the permission) to melt them.

If your business isn’t like this, congratulations! You’ve invested in systems and they’re paying off. Sadly though, many businesses haven’t (engineering teams included) and they’re just one typo away from a meltdown.

The Small Tools That Matter

A few years ago, I built a simple CLI tool for GitHub. Its only job was to pin every GitHub Action to a specific SHA. That’s it. It took an afternoon to write.

Before that, every repository had workflows that pulled the latest version of an action. This was fine, until one day an upstream change broke half our builds. The “fix” was manual: open each repo, edit the workflow to pin to a specific commit hash, commit, push. Tedious, error-prone, and repeated by multiple teams.

So I wrote a CLI that scanned all repos in our org and pinned each action automatically. One run. Hundreds of snowflakes gone.

No one outside engineering noticed. But internally, it saved dozens of hours and reduced risk every time someone added a new workflow.

Toolsmiths Aren’t Just Developers

Toolsmithing is a mindset, not a job title. It’s what happens when someone sees a messy process and refuses to accept it as normal.

• In BI, it’s the analyst who turns scattered spreadsheets into a shared dashboard that updates automatically.
• In Support, it’s the agent who builds a small search interface over logs so others don’t need to memorize file paths or grep commands.
• In Partnerships, it’s the manager who realises that every customer onboarding ends up being unique, and builds a form or workflow that standardizes it.

These people often work in isolation because organizations don’t recognize what they’re doing as engineering. But it is engineering - just applied to people, processes, and information ins tead of servers and code.

Start Small, Then Scale

There’s a myth that internal tools need to be fully featured products. That mindset kills most automation before it starts. A wiki page of useful commands is a great first tool. A small script that one team uses can later become an API or a workflow in Slack.

The question isn’t “Can we build this perfectly?” It’s “Is this pain common enough to solve once and share?”

Too many companies overengineer the idea of tooling. They spin up projects, assign teams, and stall under the weight of process. But the best tools start informally. They’re acts of curiosity, not mandates. And once proven useful, they can be hardened, shared, and maintained.

Build Without Overbuilding

Code is a liability, and not every solution needs it. Some of the best internal tools aren’t codebases at all. They’re Zapier automations, Airtable forms, or Slack workflows. Platforms like Retool and Node-RED exist precisely to help non-developers build lightweight, domain-specific tools.

But even there, restraint matters. Internal tools don’t need to impress anyone; they need to save time. David Tuite calls this out in his essay on “the hidden cost of mediocre internal tools”: if a tool is 80% right and saves hours a week, that’s success. Perfection is the enemy of progress.

The Cultural Blind Spot

Here’s the uncomfortable part: most companies don’t reward toolsmiths. They celebrate heroics instead. Everyone hears about the engineer who pulls an all-nighter, the support rep who clears a backlog manually. But we don’t need any more superheroes.

A toolsmith’s work is quieter. It’s the absence of pain, not the spectacle of solving it. But that quiet efficiency compounds. Each script, dashboard, and workflow removes another point of friction - another snowflake. Over time, it transforms the company’s metabolism.

The irony is that the companies best at building products for others are often the worst at building tools for themselves.

Melting Snowflakes at Scale

Empowering toolsmiths doesn’t mean spinning up a new “internal tools” department. It means creating permission structures that let anyone automate what hurts. It means treating those efforts as strategic, not peripheral. Give them time to do the work, and access to the systems they need.

Imagine if every engineer, analyst, and operations specialist had an hour a week to improve their own workflow. Imagine if they had access to shared infrastructure. A data warehouse, a Retool instance, a place to share scripts safely. The compound effect would dwarf most process initiatives.

That’s how you grow fast without breaking things: you melt snowflakes before they become avalanches.

Build Systems, not Empires

Organizations love to talk about scale, but scale doesn’t come from adding headcount. It comes from eliminating friction. Toolsmiths are the people who make that possible.

If you want to grow, don’t just hire more hands. Empower the ones you have to build better tools. Give them permission to tinker. Recognise their work.

Because every snowflake you melt makes your company a little stronger.