In a recent post to his blog Marco Tabini talks about what he calls the lost art of using your brain, the fact that people seem to be relying more on the contents of other peoples' brains instead of their own.

The world of technology is riddled with inhabitants who treat tools as if they were religions. OOP, unit tests, patterns... these are all instruments that are supposed to make some jobs better, and not theological formulas that will magically make every single line of code written on the face of the Earth better. And yet, the vast majority of people treats them like they are, sparking everything from language wars to endless-and pointless - discussions on whether a particular technique is better than another.

He goes on to say that the tools developers use every day aren't just limited to the technology that makes them up. They're there to make things easier, but if the developer using them doesn't take the time to engage their minds to use them correctly, they're practically useless (100% code coverage, for example). He shares his three reasons why he thinks this issue is so wide-spread and the steps he suggests to push out of this way of thinking and back into a more mindful, thinking sort of development path.