Craft has always been at the center of what I do. Whether working as an illustrator, graphic designer, user interface designer, or software engineer, mastering the tools and techniques of the craft are at the heart of my professional life. Mastery of craft is of course essential in order to bring an idea to life. But what is perhaps even more valuable to me is the pure pleasure derived from the practice of the craft. Being in that flow state, where our sense of time shifts, and our focus narrows to a place where the only thing that exists is the art and ourselves, which meld. My dream is to spend all of my working day in a flow state. But, it is hard to do when the world demands so many different things of you. I think we can all relate.

Recently, Ben Affleck was giving his opinion on the role of AI and the film business. His quote, "Craftsman[ship] is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop." distilled the essence of his argument, I think. While I largely agree with him, the trouble is that in my opinion, art emerges from, and is deeply related to craft. The best artists don’t sit around scratching their chins thinking about “art” and then when they have some great idea, they hand it off to some “craftsman” to execute it. In my experience it is the other way around. Through the practice of the craft, being in that deep flow state, one with the medium, that is where the artistic ideas emerge from some deep mysterious well.

Think about some of your favorite artists in music, visual art, film, or writing. Did they just create one or two great works, or a huge volume? Usually it is the latter. Prince. Bach. Scorsese. Picasso. The list goes on, but all of them gained mastery of their craft by practicing it deeply and producing large bodies of work. And from this mastery grew their art.

So, what to do when Generative Artificial Intelligence is mastering much of the craft that artists have practiced? Will we lose the ability to be an artist, to “know when to stop”? I am not sure, actually.

One approach is to simply ignore what AI is capable of, and simply practice your craft of choice. Into oil painting, guitar, or writing? Go for it. This is all fine and well of course for the hobbyist or the independently wealthy artist. The challenge occurs when it becomes no longer economically viable to do it the human way. Humans are just too damn slow. When I was working as a professional illustrator, I would usually take a few days, and sometimes a week or more to execute a paid commission. Compare that to today where it literally takes minutes to generate something of equal quality. Well, let’s be honest, usually even better than I could ever achieve. This makes it harder and harder to justify the time and expense needed for the human to practice the craft.

The same goes for software engineering, another craft I have practiced professionally. In today’s workforce, how many engineers can justify doing everything as they were a few years ago, without generative AI doing more and more of the work? When economic forces are at work, humans just can’t keep up.

So, what to do? Will meaningful “art” start to disappear? I would like to think not. Throughout history, there has been example after example of some new technology coming along that threatens to eliminate some meaningful craft from the lives of humans. And usually, the predictions of loss do actually come true. However, what always seems to happen is that humans find new crafts to master, and from these new crafts come new ways of creating meaning.

The thing is, I don’t really know at this point what these future crafts will be. My intuition is they will in some way be a melding of AI tools and human craft and artistic endeavor. Perhaps I am seeing a glimmer of how this will work in my experience working with AI-powered IDEs such as Cursor. There, the AI is not really writing all of my code for me in one fell swoop. The AI tools are allowing me to build more and do it more quickly. But, I often feel more like an engineering manager than a software engineer when working this way. I already miss the old days of painstakingly piecing together an application line by line, headphones on, lost in the flow state. But, it is hard to justify the time it takes to work that way. Why build an API in a few weeks, when you can do it in a day?

In an age of AI, two big questions are coming into focus.

The first question is: What will deep mastery of craft in the age of AI look like? Will it be some kind of deep melding of the human with the AI? We have some glimmers of this possibly in what we are seeing in software engineering. The challenge for the practitioner it seems is how to take advantage of the speed of the AI without losing your own deep understanding of the craft. I don’t know the answer to this.

The second question is: True mastery of any craft takes a long time. In an age when the economic utility of any craft has increasingly shorter lifespans, how will humans ever get to deep mastery? If it can take a human decades to master a craft, how do we achieve that when the craft we have mastered is only economically viable for a very short period? It feels like we are entering a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify spending decades learning anything before it is obsolete. How will we achieve mastery of anything in the future?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I do believe - deeply - that real art does emerge from mastery of craft. I will continue to practice my crafts - software, image making, music. Some for economic reasons, some purely for pleasure. I also want to start writing more, and make that a part of my daily practice.

What is your craft? What brings you into your flow state? Have you found flow with AI tools?