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Dan Finlay
@danfinlay.com

Ironically: AI made me use more hand tools this week than I'd used any week in the last year. I had an LLM assist in laying out the CAD and cut list for a piece of furniture I wanted from a list of boards I had. OnShape's MCP is pretty awesome...

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net

Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

Dan Finlay
@danfinlay.com

I had to take down some redwood trees that were diseased, and had them milled on site a few years ago. It’s always exciting to get to reuse the things you’ve gathered, keeping it out of the green waste in this case, too!

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Dan Finlay
@danfinlay.com

I suspect many people will find this repulsive, but I am using this as an opportunity to learn the building technique that enabled the McMansion boom of the 90s, precisely because it allows faster easier fabrication and iteration. when planning is cheap, I want reconfiguration to be also.

Dan Finlay
@danfinlay.com

it’s funny because for all of IKEA‘s talk about selling things that can be reconfigured into other things, it’s very obvious they have not achieved that dream, but basic lumber, truss plates, and brackets do.

Dan Finlay
@danfinlay.com

One of the things that was really cool that I got to do with the AI is I had it stage the electronics. I intended to put on the shelf and it was able to discover that one of the bays was undersized using the CAD mockup, because it looked up the dimensions for every component that I named.