Most modern tools for thought were made by people deeply involved with that domain's problems (NLS, email, Smalltalk, Bravo, Mathematica, WWW). More on why: numinous.productions/ttft/#serious-
Collecting counter-examples made by people working closely with others doing serious domain work:
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Photoshop's primary developer was Thomas Knoll, a PhD student in computer vision. He was spurred by his brother, John Knoll, who was working on film special effects at Industrial Light and Magic. (But John did actually develop some of the software, too!)
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Is auto-tune a tool of thought in the same way Photoshop is? I believe the original developer was a digital signal processing engineer in the oil industry.
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