🛠️ The new Artisan Age

We live in a world of powerful tools. Milwaukee battery-powered hand tools, high-end PCB design suites, cloud platforms, open-source tools, etc. And while these tools get us a good way toward the goal, they do not do everything. Additionally, if all you ever use is the mainstream tools, what differentiates you from anyone else? What prevents others from doing exactly what you are doing - at a lower cost?

In a previous era, artisan woodworkers built many of their own tools (fixtures, jigs, squares, planes, storage systems, etc.). As a result, they could highly optimize for their needs and projects. Tools were not very complex, so it was possible to make them. Today, things are much more complex. The things we can buy, or in the case of Open Source use for free, are endless. Many of them are very useful, but not always exactly what is needed. There is still friction, waste, manual steps, things that don't work together, integration pain points, etc.

In the past, it was very time-consuming to solve integration and automation problems in complex systems. However, today we are entering a new era where we can again build tools for complex systems - with AI. AI is excellent at scripting, automation, testing, configuration, using APIs, generating fixtures, processing data, etc. Things that would have taken days to implement and figure out, we can now do in a few minutes. In many ways, we are entering a new artisan age where we can once again craft custom tools tailored to our specific needs and workflows. The biggest win with AI is not building your products, but rather using it to build a custom platform to build your products.