Becoming Gnarly: essays on craft, judgment, and taking the harder path — starting with making in the AI era.
Some of these go deep on code — read just those.
Becoming Gnarly, by email
Series · read in order
Latest
October 16, 2026 · by Michael Morrison · Tiny Bass Lines
The bass riff under Ice-T's I'm Your Pusher is six notes long. Getting to the bottom of them runs through a 1972 nightclub scene, a garage in LA, two misread anti-drug records, a rap beef settled by the Zulu Nation, and a shark movie.
Every essay, newest first
October 7, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
In 1982 a musicians' union voted to ban the synthesizer, and they were right about what it would cost them. The gains arrived forty years later, from a toy.
September 30, 2026 · by Michael Morrison Dev
The source code to a game I wrote in 1993 was gone, so I rebuilt it from the shipped binary, deriving every rule by inference. Days after I finished, a floppy gave the source back — and graded the reconstruction. On what you learn by having to prove a thing instead of read it.
September 18, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
I sent a handful of cold emails about a thing I'd built, and one came back accusing me of being the noise. The scathing reply I had half-written was the most satisfying thing I'd composed in months. What stopped me from sending it was the machine I was being accused of hiding behind.
September 16, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Some processes were never held together by discipline. They were held together by the wait, a delay doing gate-work nobody assigned it. Nobody misses a checkpoint that was never on the org chart.
September 11, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
A historian traced five thousand years of document verification and ended on a question: can we build the digital equivalent of the cylinder seal? We did, decades ago. It works exactly as well as the original, which is the part worth understanding.
September 9, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
The new mark on this site is traced from a wooden bass bridge Les Paul carved in his home workshop. It reached me through two gifts and one refusal. Nobody charged anybody for any of it.
September 2, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 14 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
I've built mountain bike trails with hand tools and ridden the kind a machine cuts in a day. The difference was never care. It's a four-foot blade that can't ask above-or-below-this-rock.
August 28, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 27 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
I've made Rick Rubin the hero of three essays without once stress-testing him. Strip the reverence off his method and it's a guy in a room saying "again" until it lands. So was the marketing director who did it to my friend Terry. So am I, at an AI prompt, all day.
August 21, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 30 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
Why a competent adult would choose to be bad at things on purpose. Two kinds of starting over — the joyful reset and the dragon you've spent a life avoiding — and a dusty inherited guitar I decided to make mean something.
August 19, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 29 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
A story about giving away a domain name to a nonprofit and getting a four-year-late thank-you in the form of doubles on a vert ramp. The gift economy of skateboarding still works because both ends of it know how to operate without keeping score.
August 14, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 28 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
I use AI every day and disclose it every time, and I think a few companies acquiring the means of thought is one of the most serious things happening in our lifetimes. Those two facts don't fight — and the rage that pretends they do is the surest way to lose the argument that matters.
August 12, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 26 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
I spent a run of essays telling you to relocate to your taste. I never said where taste comes from. The forge that built mine is one I'd never run again, and the machine is quietly removing it for everyone coming up behind me.
August 7, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 25 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
In basketball, height stands in for skill often enough that nobody bothers questioning it. AI is height anyone can rent, and the tape measure is coming for every sport at once.
August 5, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 24 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
There is a class of product whose success metric is the user disengaging: falling asleep, finishing the book, putting the controller down. Sojourn is one. Almost everything in the standard playbook inverts.
August 3, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
We already settled how to handle a tool that does part of the work for you. It happened in math class, and nobody in the current panic wants to look at what we decided.
July 31, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 23 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
Small room, no scoreboard, and the artifact left to do its own arguing. It doesn't scale to mass. I've been quietly building my projects into that shape anyway.
July 29, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 22 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
AI is finishing the job streaming started — turning artists into brands and their work into the brand's marketing. Performance was supposed to be the refuge, but the economics ended up somewhere weirder. We may all be headed toward being t-shirt salesmen.
July 24, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 21 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
A driverless racing series would be a flawless spectacle with no reason on earth to watch it. The two things optimization can't fake are a clock and a rival.
July 22, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 20 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
The art world, supposedly the temple of the artist's hand, abandoned the hand four centuries ago and called it genius. Many hands and one name, the arrangement everyone fears in AI, is the oldest move in fine art.
July 17, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 19 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
For four years I wrote the technical screening tests companies used to decide who got programming jobs. I took that work after a GPA filter kept me out of a job I could already do.
July 15, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 18 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
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.
July 10, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 17 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
The monastic scribes had a good four hundred years, and nobody sent word it was ending. The paid-creator era is a window of the same kind, and the consolation on offer isn't comfort.
July 8, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 16 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
A brand-new guitar, factory-aged to look like it survived forty years of gigs. You can buy the wear. You can't buy the years that earned it, and I'm no longer certain anyone still checks.
July 6, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 15 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
A chemically identical stone, grown in three weeks, for a fraction of the price. It didn't disrupt the diamond. It said out loud what the premium had always been for.
July 3, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 13 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
Every player better than you in your beer league is a ringer; every tool past the one you learned on is cheating. The cheating line always indexes to the self — except writing turns out to have one kind of friction the panic keeps getting right by accident.
July 1, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 12 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
A quick test for whether AI is coming for something you love: picture the version that does it for you, and watch whether you feel relief or theft. A skateboard riding itself and a backyard beehive explain the rest.
June 29, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 11 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
The dream of AI-assisted work is a machine that checks its own output and lets us leave the room. A master forger, and the chemistry that finally caught him, is why I don't think that loop closes.
June 26, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 10 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
We hand machines near-total control of an airliner at 500 mph with our lives aboard and don't blink, then call it untenable when an AI helps write a jingle. I don't think that asymmetry is hypocrisy.
June 24, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 9 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
Music spent a decade trying to legally police influence, in a medium where the units are unusually legible. It went badly, in ways worth knowing before we try the same thing on everything at once.
June 22, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
I built a skateboard mini ramp with the transition radius cut from a vinyl template off an Illustrator drawing. The vinyl stretched, the radius came out an ellipse no one could see — only feel — and fixing it meant tearing the ramp down to a pencil on a string.
June 19, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 8 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
Everyone arguing over whether AI-assisted work is 'more than 50% human' is measuring with a unit that never existed. The older questions are the ones I'd rather answer.
June 18, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Why I say please to a machine that can't feel it, what the habit might be doing to me, and the line between courtesy and contempt I can't quite locate.
June 17, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 7 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
I built a tool that detects AI writing, and it called me a fake. The honest test wasn't my AI-assisted essays — it was my pre-AI archive. The tells were in there, dated 2008, including the one I'm most accused of.
June 15, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 6 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
Models write two kinds of prose with opposite needs: one where surface noise is texture, one where surface noise is failure. Run Hunter S. Thompson through the wrong one and watch what leaves.
June 12, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 5 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
The most undervalued thing AI does for me isn't making things. It's arguing. The sharpest interlocutor I have is a machine, which is a gift and a little lonely.
June 10, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 4 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
Why use AI at all? I have three answers, and only one of them is about speed.
June 8, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 3 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
AI moved the locus of value in software from writing code to deciding what's worth writing. The same move, lagging by a few years, is arriving in the creative arts. And software, a field where the surface has always moved, may have something useful to say about how to meet it.
June 5, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 2 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
A joke about a product that frees you from the one thing you actually wanted to do. Convenience has a default direction, and nobody votes on it.
June 2, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 1 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
The through-line under everything else here — the essays, the software, the games, the bees, the skate ramps. It has to do with picking the harder way on purpose, and with knowing when that's just vanity.
