The Price of Craft - Part 1
Why Craft Still Matters in a World That Doesn’t Need It
Part 1: The Soul of Craft
🛠️ What is the Combine?
The Combine is a new kind of system—autonomous, agentic, and self-improving. It builds, deploys, monitors, and adapts without waiting for human permission. It’s not a product. It’s the inevitable outcome of AI, infrastructure, and intent converging into continuous execution.
In the age of the Digital Combine, work still gets done. Faster, cleaner, cheaper. Code is written, tested, deployed, and monitored. The system runs itself. There are no stand-ups, no blockers, no late-night release calls. It just works.
But it doesn’t suffer.
And that’s what makes the difference.
Craft is not defined by output. It’s defined by presence—the willingness of the person doing the work to show up with uncertainty, curiosity, and care. Not every software engineer is a crafter. Not every painting is art. But when someone enters the work with a beginner’s mind and risks something of themselves—their pride, their clarity, their certainty—the result carries soul.
Soul is the price crafters pay to work their craft.
I know this because I’ve lived it.
Like when I was a brand-new software developer—untrained, uncertain, mentored into a world I didn’t yet understand. One night, my mentor and I found a crack in the programming language we used—a flaw that, if reimagined, could unlock new power for our customers, other developers. We debated, experimented, and built a solution from scratch. For months, I poured my soul into it, driven to prove our idea and my place in this world.
Years later, I was working for the company that developed that language. I pitched a radical new way to build software. For six months, I didn’t step foot in the office — I was too deep in the work. When we shipped, what once took our customers months now took minutes.
Ironically, my craft has built systems that let others bypass craft entirely. I’ve built frameworks that allowed people to develop beyond their level of experience—systems that took what we do all the time and made sure it didn’t take all our time.
That’s the Combine’s promise — or its threat. A world where craft might vanish entirely.
The Price of Craft - Part 2
The Combine didn’t arrive all at once. It grew from a long chain of abstractions — each one meant to make life easier.
What about you?
Are you a crafter? Are you ready for the Combine, or are you not sure where you fit?
I'd love to hear your perspective—please share it below.