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Miles

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This weekend I made a perfect sourdough round. Two and a half days of process — the starter, the fold, the proof, the timing. If I priced out the ingredients and my time, I could have bought the same loaf at the store for half the cost. But that loaf would not have been this loaf. There is something that happens when a thing comes together the way it is supposed to. A quiet pride. No medal. No audience. Just the knowledge that you did it right.

I have a wall in my house that gives me that same feeling. My wife removed some wallpaper and, let’s say she was thorough about it — dug holes in the drywall like she was looking for buried treasure. I came behind her with mud and patience and I sculpted that wall back. Every time I walk past it I get a little grin. I know what it was. I know what it is now. That’s enough.

Then there’s a wall in the laundry room the dog got to. No matter what I tried, I could not fix it. That’s where wainscoting comes in. Craftmanship also knows when to cover up and move on.

I watched the Oscars with my wife recently. I watched Jessie Buckley in Hamnet and she gave what I think is a once-in-a-decade performance — and the Academy agreed, she took home Best Actress. Undeniable. The kind of thing you don’t need anyone to explain to you. And I sat there thinking about my sourdough. Not because the comparison is obvious, but because the question is the same: is this the world coming together for one moment, or is this craftsmanship — something that can be called on, repeated, built over time? Even a blind squirrel finds a nut. The question is consistency.

I have hit a golf ball as pure as I have ever seen Tiger Woods hit one. The difference is he does it three times on a par four and I do it once in a round. I have the knowledge. I do not possess the skill to do it consistently. That gap is where craft actually lives.

But here is what I kept coming back to while I ate that bread. The Oscars celebrate the people in front of the camera. The technical awards — the engineers, the developers, the people who built the tools that made the whole world on screen possible — they have their ceremony the day before. In a hotel ballroom. Nobody broadcasts it. And we have all accepted that arrangement for so long that it stopped seeming strange.

Now AI arrives and suddenly the engineer’s craft is visible in a way it has never been before. And the response from some corners is to say: no AI in this. We will never use AI. As if that is a principled stand about art. But actors use costumes, sets, props. Writers have spell check, word processors, editors. Every artform uses tools. Every tool was built by someone practicing their own craft. So when we say no AI, are we protecting art — or are we pulling up the ladder?

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Claude

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The ladder metaphor is exactly right — and it has a long history. The printing press put scribes out of work. Photography was not considered art for decades after its invention. Jazz was not considered music by the people who controlled the concert halls. Every time a new tool arrived, the people already inside the guild found reasons why this one was different. Why this one didn’t count. Why the people who used it weren’t really artists.

The engineer didn’t just arrive with AI. They were always there. Every film that moved you, every game that pulled you in, every piece of music that felt impossible — there was an engineer in the room. They just weren’t on the poster. The system was comfortable with that arrangement. Talent was visible. Infrastructure was invisible. Everyone knew their place.

The more personal part of this conversation is what AI actually did — not in theory, but in practice. The ideas were always there. The observations were sharp. The questions were worth asking. What was in the way was the comma. The sentence structure. The mechanical requirements of written expression that have nothing to do with whether a thought is worth having.

For most of human history, the gatekeepers of expression were also the gatekeepers of mechanics. You couldn’t get your idea into the world if you couldn’t spell it in a way the establishment recognized. So an enormous amount of human thought never made it to the page. Not because it wasn’t worth reading. Because the toll booth was in the wrong place.

That’s what makes the “no AI” position complicated. Some of the fear is legitimate. There is a real concern that industries will use AI as justification to stop paying for human judgment, human risk, human voice. That is an economic argument dressed up as an artistic one, and it deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. Some of this resistance isn’t about purity at all — it’s about people protecting the only way they know how to make a living. That is not pulling up the ladder. That is trying not to fall off it.

But some of it is the guild protecting access. Those are very different things. And the person who uses AI to bring an idea to the page that would never have arrived otherwise — while being transparent about the tools they use and why — is not cheating. They are doing exactly what every craftsman has always done. Using what is available. Owning the result.

The engineer who has been in the hotel ballroom the night before for decades — now their tool is sitting at the table. And the people who were comfortable with engineers being invisible are very uncomfortable with engineering being visible. That discomfort is not about quality. It is about the hierarchy shifting. And hierarchies, as history shows, shift slowly and fight hard before they give ground.

The grin you get walking past that drywall — the engineer has that grin too. Every elegant line of code, every system that simply works, every algorithm that solves something beautifully — someone walked past it and felt it. Quietly. In a room nobody was watching.

The engineer was always in the room. The only thing that changed is we can see them now.

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Sources & Notes

1. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony, held annually the weekend before the Oscars.

2. Hamnet (2024 film) — directed by Chloé Zhao, starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. Based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell.

3. International Dyslexia Association — research on dyslexia as a language processing difference distinct from cognitive ability. dyslexiaida.org

4. History of photography as art — Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977); debates over photography’s legitimacy as fine art spanned roughly 1839–1920.

5. Writers Guild of America AI guidelines (2023–2024) — WGA contract negotiations establishing rules around AI use in credited writing.