Guy Jenkins on craft:
There is a joint in woodworking called the dovetail. It requires no glue. No screws. Just two pieces of wood cut with such precision that they lock together through geometry alone - tight, strong, beautiful. A master joiner can cut one by hand in minutes. An apprentice might spend a whole afternoon and still produce something that rocks.
The dovetail cannot be faked. You either cut it true or you don’t.
I think about the dovetail a lot when I watch AI generate interfaces. […] There’s little geometry underneath. No locked joints. Just the appearance of craft without the knowledge that produced it. […] It gives me an appreciation for precision, for tooling and for patience.
Using AI skillfully involves recognizing what it lacks, which means spending significant time studying and critiquing its outputs.