Data Custodian

I signed up for the courses. Plural. I finished maybe a third of one. Not because they were bad. Because somewhere around the fourth module of watching someone else's terminal, I realized I was doing the equivalent of reading a book about swimming while sitting on the pool deck, fully dry, taking notes. So I closed the tabs and started building something. Here's the thing nobody tells you: the frameworks are incredible. Genuinely. The abstractions are elegant, the documentation is better than most enterprise software I've paid for, and the ecosystem moves faster than anything I've worked with in twenty years. But all of that only became useful after I had my hands in it and had already broken things. Before that, it was noise. Elegant, well-documented noise. It's the bike. You can read the physics of gyroscopic precession and countersteering and you will still eat pavement on the first attempt. Then one day your body just knows. Nothing in the reading did that. The...

I asked an assistant to run the same workflow it ran for me last week. It failed the exact same way. Same missing edge case, same wrong assumption, same fix I'd already explained once, out loud, in plain English. I hadn't told it to remember the fix. I assumed it would, because that's the story everyone's been sold. AI that gets smarter the more you use it. AI that learns your preferences. AI that improves with every conversation, like a junior employee who eventually stops asking where the stapler is. "Here's the part that's going to make some people mad: none of that is true, and it was never close to true." Anthropic calls them Skills. OpenAI has custom instructions and GPTs. Other platforms call them workflows, playbooks, automations. The label changes. The architecture underneath does not. Every one of them is a text file. Instructions written down once, read fresh every single time, with zero memory of the last time they failed you. The file does...

My coworker Bri posted a prompt in one of our Slack channels back in August. About fifty lines in a code block, a sunshine emoji, and the line that did the real work: feel free to borrow the instructions to create your own. I borrowed it that afternoon. The design instincts in it are good ones, and they are the reason I did not start over. It ranks work against her actual goals rather than by due date. It links the doc you need so the list is one click from the thing it is about. It runs on a schedule, so it shows up whether or not you remember to ask. Those three calls are the hard part, and she got all three right. She had also gone to the trouble of having Claude rewrite her version to be general so anyone could pick it up, which is a generous thing to do with something you built for yourself. Then I pointed it at my Tuesday. The problem was my week, not her prompt A recipe assumes a working kitchen. My kitchen is a mess. Four back-to-back meetings, an approval nobody has...

Saturday morning, the CNC is running a pocket for an inlay and I am eight feet away with a chisel, cleaning up the corners of a mitered box the machine will never touch. Two tools. Same project. Nobody in the shop thinks this is a contradiction. But post a picture of it online and someone will show up in the comments within an hour to tell you it does not count. That a real woodworker cuts everything by hand. That the machine did the work. I used to have opinions about this. Now I mostly just think about who is going to sand it. The question people are actually asking The comment is never really about the machine. It is about whether you did anything. And it is the exact same comment I hear at work about AI, delivered by people in much nicer clothing. Did you write that or did the model write it. Is this your thinking or is it borrowed. Does it count. Both times, the question is aimed at the wrong end of the process. The machine did not decide the box should be ...