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FridgeSeal parent
“Do t worry about the fit and finish in your craftsmanship anymore, just bolt everything together and move on to other woodworking”

Is how that argument comes across.


Veedrac
This seems broadly correct? Industrialization was amazing for people's standard of living, but it absolutely meant that the average physical good became detached from their craftsmen's learned and aesthetic preferences.
jaggederest
And contrariwise, the argument against tools like these sounds like:

"I never use power tools or CNC, I only use hand tools. Even if they would save me an incredible amount of time and let me work on other things, I prefer to do it the slow and painstaking way, even if the results are ultimately almost identical."

Sure, you can absolutely true up stock using a jointer plane, but using a power jointer and planer will take about 1/10th of the time and you can always go back with a smoothing plane to get that mirror finish if you don't like the machine finish.

Likewise, if your standards are high and your output indistinguishable, but the AI does most of the heavy lifting for the rough draft pass, where's the harm? I don't understand everyone who says "the AI only makes slop" - if you're responsible for your commits and you do a good job, it's indistinguishable.

FridgeSeal OP
I’d actually argue that we have some absolutely fantastic tools already that are the equivalent of the things like CBC and power tools.

Dev tooling has gotten pretty solid these days, LSP’s and debug protocols, massively improved type-system UX, libs and frameworks with massively improved DX, deployment tools that are basically zero touch, fantastic observability tooling, super powerful IDE’s.

The CNC machine doesn’t wander off and start lathing watermelons when you’re not looking and your planar doesn’t turn into a spaghetti monster and eat your dog if you accidentally plane some wood on the wrong day of the week.

int_19h
Realistically, though, even if AI doesn't only make slop, the amount of effort it takes to ensure that it's not slop is even harder to justify than maintaining a "clean" codebase manually used to be. More and more you'll see that "rough draft pass" ending up as shipped product.

Why? Well, it happened that way when manual tradecraft gave way to automated manufacturing in just about every other industry, so why should ours be exempt?

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