I write essays and books. I build software and games. I keep bees and skate ramps. These things are more connected than they look. The essays make a case for taking the harder path — in craft, in work, in the things worth not handing off. The current arc is taste, judgment, and craft in the AI era, but the subject is older than AI and will outlast it. The catalog holds forty-seven technical books across two decades plus a bunch of translations. The vault is where the older material lives, including the origin document for everything I’m working on now. For more on the software and games I build, check out Stalefish Labs .
July 17, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 18 of 18 so far in The Automation Line
For four years I wrote the technical screening tests companies used to decide who got programming jobs — after a GPA filter once kept me out of a job I could already do. The hiring-gate companion to The Gate Was the Product, told from inside, and the thing no test ever caught: you can't really know a person until you work beside them.
July 15, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 17 of 18 so far in The Automation Line
Some creative reputations were earned and some were just gatekeeping, and cheap AI is quietly exposing which is which. A field guide to the galleries, labels, and imprints that were protecting the work — and the ones only charging rent to get in. Written from the ungated side, where I've always stood.
Note
The most undervalued use of AI is thinking, not making — and the one discipline that separates leveling up from being expertly flattered: don't ask whether your idea is good, ask how it fails.
July 14, 2026
July 10, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 16 of 18 so far in The Automation Line
The paid-creator era was a rent on a scarcity, like the monastic scribes and the single-earner household before it: a window that felt permanent and wasn't. Every livelihood is a rent on a scarcity, and the consolation isn't comfort. It's an explanation.
July 8, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 15 of 18 so far in The Automation Line
A brand-new guitar, factory-aged to look like it survived forty years of gigs, turns out to be the whole AI question in one object: you can buy the wear, but never the years that earned it. On lived experience as the one input nothing can counterfeit — and the uncomfortable bet about whether anyone still cares.
Note
The joke at the center of The Automation Line: some things you do for the outcome, some things are the doing, and the whole skill is telling which one you're holding before you let go.
July 7, 2026
From the Vault
2008
A 2008 blog post wondering whether songs or movies could replace text passwords. Aged in interesting ways — passkeys mostly went the biometric …
From the Catalog
O'Reilly · 2008
A learn-by-doing guide to building dynamic, database-driven web applications with PHP and MySQL. Co-authored with Lynn Beighley as part of O'Reilly's …
From the Builds
Complete (rain catchers later removed) · 2012
A pair of self-watering raised garden beds built from galvanized stock tanks — sub-irrigated from a gravel reservoir below, fed three different ways, …