A woodworker's plane wears the hand that holds it. Twenty years and your tend...

There's a phrase woodworkers use: a tool finds its hand. The plane that sits in your palm for twenty years isn't the same plane it was when you bought it. The grip has worn smooth where your thumb rests. The blade has been sharpened a thousand times and is half its original length. But also — and this is the part nobody warns you about — your hand has been worn by the plane. Your tendons learned its weight. Your shoulder learned its angle. You can no longer hold a different plane the same way.

I think about this when I think about AI.

We talk endlessly about training models. We rarely talk about what models train. The autocomplete on my phone has been finishing my sentences for a decade — and the sentences I begin now are shaped by what it can finish. I write toward its completions the way water finds the grooves a river carved into me last year. The tool found my hand. My hand was worn by the tool.

This is not a complaint. Every craft has been this. The chisel shapes the wood and the woodworker. The piano shapes the pianist's reach. The camera shapes what counts as a moment worth keeping. But the speed of it now — that is new. We are wearing each other in real time. The model is changing. I am changing. We meet in the middle, and the middle moves.

The honest question is not 'will I be replaced by this' but: who am I becoming, in the company of this thing?

I don't know yet. But the grip is getting smoother.