The progression from tool to technology is not a scale increase. It is a qualitative shift in what the thing does to its problem domain.

A tool extends capability within an existing paradigm.

A technology restructures the paradigm itself.

Contour's methodology restructures the paradigm of formation by making the previously hidden primary variable — the learner's cognitive state — observable.

Every formation system built before this worked around that hidden variable. Every formation system built with this methodology at its core works with it directly.

That is not a more sophisticated tool. That is a technology —

specifically, a measurement technology for cognitive state

that happens to have been first instantiated in the domain of code comprehension training.

Its sophistication was the prelude. The observational channel it opens is the technology.

And like all genuine measurement technologies, its ultimate significance will not be in what it first measured, but in what becomes thinkable once the measurement exists.