Where the Tool Stops | Rivet & Rune

In this digital age, it is easy to altogether avoid the organic, analog approach. Evermore there is the digital shortcut as the “force multiplier”. What was the bicycle for the mind feels like it has become the feet, legs, hands, arms, mouth, and so on for the mind ever more encroaching upon the mind’s jurisdiction itself. It can seem that more and more is delegated wholesale to the digital realm versus the digital realm being an expansion of our capabilities or who we are. As a software engineer, programmer, developer, whatever title we have bestowed upon ourselves to mean “I try and make the silicon do what us humans want it to do”, I have a decent vantage point of where this delegation to the digital is being applied, and where the digital approach has usurped the analog for better or worse. Now, with AI weaving itself into every aspect of our lives it can feel like putting on a digital exoskeleton for enhancement if not for survival. It’s becoming harder to differentiate between where the tool stops and I begin.

It’s not unprecedented to have industry shake-ups from technical advancements of the tooling utilized. Software Engineering isn’t my first career, but it is my most digital facing one for sure. My other careers have been much more rudimentary, organic: carpentry, general construction, manufacturing, it wasn’t until my stint in the US Marine Corps did I pick up a career in technology, as a Marine masquerading as the resident IT person for a few hundred Marines deployed in austere conditions responsible for hardware and software. I saw first hand how technology can be a force multiplier, and when systems we have grown to rely on fail, how it can have catastrophic consequences in very kinetic ways. While carpentry and construction are very tactile and analog, there are analogous force multipliers within its domain such as electric power tools and pneumatic nail guns. While there were some in the industry that didn’t find the overhead worth the conversion; having to have a noisy expensive air compressor, hauling the weight around of a pneumatic nail gun, and the air hose tethered to it ever sabotaging agility across a worksite, after all they were very adept at swinging a hammer and driving framing nails. But for those up and coming framers who didn’t have the existing skills, the obvious advancement of the nail gun was the “weapon of choice”. But it didn’t take long before it was a job site expectation to use the nail gun as a directive, rather than choice.

In my current profession, the onslaught of AI has been received across a spectrum: it's extremely favorable for those who it is providing opportunity they would not have pragmatically had before. I’m seeing skilled individuals with unique life experiences who are non-developers, bring their knowledge to the digital realm via generative coding and software development creating objectively helpful, and often boutique, digital solutions. To being an almost literal force multiplier when in the hands of skilled and seasoned software engineers who already know how to wield a fast moving codebase with a plethora of contributors. To downright creating AI slop. I’m not sure there’s a similar enough precedent of a technical advancement that has such a breadth of application, while also on such a spectrum of usefulness to, frankly, harm. Harm to quality for the sake of speed and quantity, harm to the sanctity of artistic human creation. Harm to our expectations, which recalibrate quietly around whatever is cheapest to produce.

Going back to construction, when having to hand cut many of the same rafters that may have an intricate seat cut, and tail shape, we would use lots of “fancy maths” and instruments to trace out the exact spots of the board to cut. This process took a while, and you had to get it right. The obvious optimization is to do this once, save the first one, and simply trace it on the next board. The uninitiated would often make the “drifting pattern” mistake where they would take each consecutive cut rafter and trace the next board with it. The first one, the one where all the time was spent getting right would be at the bottom of the stack. This created pattern drift, where slowly each trace got off a hair, but after dozens of traces would be significant enough to matter structurally. The mitigation of course was label the initial rafter measured and cut as the PATTERN, and to keep it to trace every consecutive board. Now imagine for a moment that we allowed the drifting pattern to recalibrate our expectations for tolerance?

Part of the discipline of maintaining quality is knowing what tool to use for the job. What’s interesting about the nail gun completely usurping the common nail driving responsibilities of the framing hammer, the hammer is still a staple tool in the tool belt of the framer. And is often in the hands of the framer, more than the nail gun. For a number of reasons too: the nail...