Your knife slipped. It skated off the skin of a tomato and went sideways, and for a second that was frightening. The instinct after that is to be more careful with it, which is exactly wrong.

A sharp blade bites where you put it. A dull one needs force to start the cut and has nothing to grip with, so it slides, and now there is a lot of pressure behind a moving edge going somewhere you did not choose. Dull knives cause the serious cuts in domestic kitchens, not sharp ones.

The reason most people never fix it is that freehand sharpening is a skill. The edge is a pair of bevels meeting at a specific angle, and every stroke that is not at that angle removes metal from the wrong place, so an hour of honest effort can leave a knife duller than it started. A pull-through sharpener avoids the skill by simply grinding a fixed angle into the blade, regardless of what the blade was designed for, and takes a lot of steel each time.

A clamped guided system removes the variable instead of removing the skill. The blade is held, the abrasive travels on an arm set to a chosen angle, and every pass lands where the last one did. That repeatability is what produces a genuinely sharp edge, and it is what lets you match the angle to the knife rather than forcing every knife to one number.

Here is the limit, and it is the price. This is two hundred and fifty dollars, which is more than most people's knives. It only makes sense if you own good ones, or enough of them, or you sharpen for other people. If you have three supermarket knives, a twenty dollar pull-through is the honest recommendation and this is not.

It is also a bench system with a setup and a pack-away. It is not something you touch up with mid-cooking, and a honing rod still earns its place between sharpenings.

And it will not fix a chipped or bent blade quickly. That is a repair, and it is a lot of passes.