AI won't replace makers. It'll replace the boring parts.
The doom take and the hype take are both lazy. After a year of using AI elbow-deep in real projects, here's the actually-interesting middle: the tools are eating the toil, not the craft.
There are two boring opinions about AI and making things. One says the robots are coming for everyone. The other says it’s all a parlour trick. Both are a way of not paying attention.
Here’s what I actually see on my desk.
The toil is going. Good.
The parts of a project I never enjoyed — boilerplate, the third support structure I’ve hand-tuned this week, the README nobody wanted to write, the regex — those are evaporating. And it turns out almost none of that was the craft. It was the tax you paid to get to the craft.
The taste is not going
A model will happily generate a thousand mediocre designs. It will not tell you which one is good, because good is contextual, personal, and often a little irrational. Knowing what to make, and when something is finished, and why this version is better than that one — that’s still entirely yours. If anything it’s more valuable now, because the cost of producing options has collapsed.
The bottleneck moved. It used to be can you make it? Now it’s should you, and is this the right version? That’s a better question.
The risk nobody names
It isn’t that AI makes us obsolete. It’s that it makes us incurious. When the answer is always one prompt away, the temptation is to stop building the intuition that lets you know whether the answer is any good. The makers who win the next few years are the ones who use AI to do more of the interesting work, not to avoid understanding their own projects.
So that’s the lvl30 stance: lean in, automate the toil, and protect your taste like it’s the only thing that’s actually scarce. Because increasingly, it is.