We Stopped Chasing Shiny Tools and Started Shipping — Here's What Changed There's a pattern I see at almost every engineering team I talk to. Someone comes back from a conference fired up about a new framework. The team adopts it. Two months later, they're rewriting the rewrite. Sound familiar? I've been guilty of this myself. Last year, our team at a mid-size SaaS company went through three frontend framework migrations in 18 months. Vue 2 → React → Svelte. Each time, we told ourselves this was the one that would fix everything. By the third migration, our lead developer quit. In early 2026, we made a radical decision: stop adopting new tools for an entire year . No new frameworks, no new languages, no new databases. Just ship what we had, better. Here's what we learned — and why I think more teams should try this. The Problem: Innovation Theater The tech industry has a hype cycle problem, and engineering teams are its most enthusiastic victims. We confuse adoption with progress .…