What is Dreyfus model skill acquisition tool learning?

Dreyfus model skill acquisition tool learning is a concept in personal epistemology: Shallow knowledge of many tools is less valuable than deep mastery of a few.

Example: You watch two designers work side by side on identical briefs. Designer A uses Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Canva, and Affinity Designer — six tools, each learned to roughly the same shallow depth. When she needs to create a complex component system, she opens Figma and navigates through menus, searching for features she vaguely remembers exist. She copies a frame, manually adjusts every spacing value, rebuilds variants one by one, and periodically switches to Illustrator for vector work because she never learned Figma's pen tool well enough. The brief takes her nine hours. Designer B uses Figma. Just Figma. She learned it so deeply that auto-layout is reflexive, component variants are configured in seconds with keyboard shortcuts, constraints and responsive behavior are set during creation rather than after, and her vector work happens inside the same tool without a context switch. She has memorized forty keyboard shortcuts. She has built a personal component library over two years of deep use. She knows every edge case in Figma's prototype system because she hit them all and solved them. The same brief takes her three hours. Not because she is more talented — the two designers graduated from the same program with similar marks. Because she went deep where Designer A went wide. Designer A knows the surface of six tools. Designer B knows the soul of one. And the soul is where the leverage lives.

This concept is part of Phase 46 (Tool Mastery) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for tool mastery.