It Was Never the Plane

There’s a guy in every woodworking shop who thinks the power planer is cheating. Sometimes he’s quiet about it. Sometimes he’s got opinions. Either way the argument is old — older than me, and I’m fifty-six. It just keeps changing tools.

I run a planer. I also keep hand planes, and a block plane in my apron pocket where it’s always been. I use both. But here’s what I’ve landed on after forty years: the craft was never in the planing. Flattening six boards by hand for two days doesn’t make a better bookshelf than flattening them in fifteen minutes. The craftsmanship is in the joinery and the finish. The planer just gets me there faster.

I’ve been thinking about that argument a lot, because it’s the same one people keep trying to have with me about AI. They just don’t know it’s the same one.

When members ask what I think about AI, I tell them it’s complicated, which is the honest answer and also a way of buying time. What I mean is that I use it constantly and I’m picky about how.

Most of what it does for me is work I was never going to do well or fast on my own. The Joinery ran on a software package called Club Express for two and a half years. It collected dues, tracked who was a member and who wasn’t, and it was clunky in ways I couldn’t fix. Modifying it meant calling the company and paying for support, which I wasn’t going to do, so I lived with it. This spring I moved everything to a new system. The difference is that I can tell the AI what I want and it goes and makes the change. Adding a storage add-on to a membership used to be a day of research, a half-day of trying, and a few calls to support. Now it’s five minutes. The friction between somebody clicking a button and becoming a member got a lot smaller, and I didn’t pay a developer to do it. I don’t even pay myself at the Joinery. I wasn’t about to pay someone else.

It does my financial reading too. I have accountants, and I pay them well, but every phone call is another charge, and the reports they hand me are the reports the tax code wants, not the ones that tell me how the place is actually doing. So I give the numbers to the AI and ask it to explain them the way I need them explained. This morning I wanted a chart of studio membership growth over the last few months. I had it in under a minute.

I’m not starry-eyed about it. Image generation is a coin flip for me. Half the time it gives me something I like, and half the time it’s so far off I can’t use it, and that half is annoying. I don’t generate music, because my son Simon is a musician and he wrote the intro for the podcast. If I have a person who can do a thing, I use the person. That’s not a rule I made up for AI. It’s how I’ve always worked.

Which gets at the part people actually want answered, and it isn’t really about machines. What they’re really asking is whether using AI takes something from somebody. Here’s where I’m careful, because I spent most of my career working for musicians and actors and crews. I toured. I saw what those people get paid against what they give, and it isn’t enough. So I don’t say this lightly: the test for me was never whether a machine touched the work. The test is whether the work is good, and whether I took it out of the mouth of someone who’d have done it better and needed the job.

The podcast music is a clean case. I make no money on the podcast. There was never a budget to hire a composer, so nobody lost a gig either way. If I’d generated something instead of asking Simon, I wouldn’t have taken food off anyone’s plate. But I’d have skipped my own kid, who’s good, and who had fun doing it. The math there isn’t about AI at all.

I can tell you with total confidence that the craft isn’t in the planing. I cannot always tell you where assistance stops and replacement starts. That line moves depending on the job and the person, and I catch myself unsure which side of it I’m on. A small business owner who uses AI to design a product line and then figures out how to make it and sell it is using a tool to reach further than they could alone. Somebody generating a thousand images because they can, for no reason, with nothing behind it — I don’t have a use for that, and I don’t think it’s worth much. Most of what falls between those two is where I actually live, and I haven’t sorted all of it out.

What I keep coming back to is the plane. I’ll still pick up the hand plane on some jobs. Not because the power one is cheating, and not out of nostalgia. Because that particular job wants the hand plane, and forty years in, I can usually tell which job is which. That judgment is the craft. It always was. The tool was never the thing.