Becoming Gnarly: essays on craft, judgment, and taking the harder path — starting with making in the AI era.
Latest
August 21, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
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.
Read in order
New here? These read as one sequence — start at the top with Becoming Gnarly and work down.
June 2, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 1 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
The through-line under everything else here — the essays, the software, the games, the bees, the skate ramps. A case for choosing the harder path when the harder path is the one worth taking, and the harder skill of telling which paths those are.
June 5, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 2 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
A joke about a product that frees you from the one thing you actually wanted to do. The line between a tool that assists living and a tool that replaces it — and why convenience has a default direction worth watching.
June 8, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 3 of 28 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 10, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 4 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
Why use AI at all? Three answers — three different unlocks — that together describe what makes AI worth the trouble for a particular kind of solo maker with a particular kind of project. The first is about craft. The second is about time. The third is about work that no number of humans could do at all.
June 12, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 5 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
The most undervalued use of AI isn't making things — it's thinking. The rubber duck that talks back, the one rule that separates leveling up from being expertly flattered, and why the sharpest interlocutor I have being a machine is both a gift and a little lonely.
June 15, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 6 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
AI models can write two kinds of prose with opposite needs — one where surface noise is texture, one where surface noise is failure. Knowing which is which is the difference between liberating a writer's voice and quietly butchering it.
June 17, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 7 of 28 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 19, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 8 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
Everyone arguing over whether AI-assisted work is 'more than 50% human' is measuring the wrong thing: percentage was never the unit of authorship. The real questions are older and simpler — whether a human was answerable for the work, and whether you were told the truth.
June 24, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 9 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
Music spent a decade trying to legally police influence, in a medium where the units are entirely legible. The result was incoherent verdicts, a chilling effect, and defensive credit-sharing that satisfies no one. The push to make AI training itself an infringement is that same mistake, aimed at everything.
June 26, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 10 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
We hand machines almost 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. That asymmetry isn't hypocrisy. It's a clue about what we're actually protecting when we insist human judgment stay in the loop.
June 29, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 11 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
The holy grail of AI-assisted work is a machine that can check its own output, close the loop, and let us take the human out of the middle. But verification was never a capability problem. It's an independence problem, and a system checking its own work has its own blind spots. A master forger — and the chemistry that finally caught him — explains why the loop can tighten but likely never close.
July 1, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 12 of 28 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.
July 3, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 13 of 28 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 6, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 14 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
Lab-grown diamonds didn't disrupt the diamond. They unmasked it. The premium was never in the rock, and a chemically identical stone made in three weeks is the thing that finally says so out loud — there's a lesson about which other premiums are next.
July 8, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 15 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
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.
July 10, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 16 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
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 15, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 17 of 28 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 17, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 18 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
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 22, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 19 of 28 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. The feared-AI model — many hands, one name — is the oldest move in fine art, and the scrutiny runs backwards: the more the buyer pays, the less the hand seems to matter.
July 24, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 20 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
A driverless racing series would be a flawless spectacle no one has a reason to watch. The two things optimization can't fake are a clock and a rival, and they're why human work still holds when the machine makes the better artifact. The watcher's-seat companion to The Self-Riding Bicycle.
July 29, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 21 of 28 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 31, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 22 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
There is a third path for creative work in the AI era, past the brand treadmill and the stage: small community, no scoreboard, the artifact does the work. It doesn't scale to mass, and that's the point. It's the configuration my AI-assisted projects are deliberately trying to occupy.
August 5, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 23 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
There is a class of products whose success metric is the user disengaging — falling asleep, finishing the book, putting the controller down. Sojourn is one. The category inverts almost everything in product design, and the next decade will need more of it than the dominant playbook predicts.
August 7, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 24 of 28 so far in Machined by Hand
Height often stands in for skill in basketball — and AI is height anyone can rent. On the tape measure coming for everyone's sport at once, and what happens to the earned middle when everybody suddenly clears the bar.
August 12, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 25 of 28 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 14, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 26 of 28 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 19, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 27 of 28 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 21, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 28 of 28 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.
Standalone
Pieces that stand on their own, outside the sequence above.
August 3, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
We already settled how to handle a tool that automates part of the work — in math class, with the calculator. The rule we landed on is exactly the one the AI-in-school panic keeps refusing to use.
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. A small parable about where to trust a machine.
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.