Where to draw the line between what you make by hand and what you let the machine make — when the assist is worth taking, when it quietly steals the work, and why the line keeps moving.
Read in order
These read as one sequence — start at the top with Becoming Gnarly and work down.
June 2, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 1 of 8 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 8 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 8 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 8 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 8 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 8 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 8 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 8 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.