Becoming Gnarly: essays on craft, judgment, and taking the harder path — starting with making in the AI era.
Latest
July 10, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
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.
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 so far in The Automation Line
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 16 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.
July 10, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 16 of 16 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.
Standalone
Pieces that stand on their own, outside the sequence above.
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.