The Shipbuilder’s Paradox
Nobody who actually built something ever romanticized the bleeding.
The attic had been built like a barn, the roof decking just true one-inch thick planks of pine for protection between the Maine winter and cavity inside. Nails from the shingles poked through and would be covered in frost, only to later melt and drip to the floorboards. The floorboards were the same one-inch rough-cut hemlock they had laid in 1892. The rafters were full-dimension two-by-eights, the real kind, actually two inches by eight inches, not the shaved-down lumber you buy at the yard today. This cycle had been going on for 130 years, this attic turning into a frozen meat-locker in the winter, and a sweltering oven in the summer.
The home was built in 1892 by shipbuilders who would come in from Bath and built houses when it was too cold to build ships. It was now 2022 and I was taking this 1000sqf attic with a 20 foot tall ridgebeam and a perfect 12:12 pitch and converting it into about 800sqft of finished, insulated, livable space.
My dad had been a homebuilder. I’d been on construction sites since the day I was born. 20th century construction sites. Not 19th century. I could not have been better prepared for this renovation, had I only been approaching it in the right century.
It was February. I could see my breath when I exhaled. An unvented attic like this would require closed-cell spray foam, a cold roof system where the foam seals the entire envelope. But before that, I had to finish ripping up the floor, removing any remaining knob-and-tube, pulling all the new wiring up through the decommissioned chimney space. Then insulation could be sprayed in, followed by adding a new layer of framing using modern 2x4s, followed by wiring, drywalling, painting, and finishing.
It was the second year of the lockdown. The world had stopped. I had stopped with it, except that I had not stopped at all. I had started doing a thing I had never done before, which was fixing every inch of a 130-year-old colonial by myself. Every trade, every weekend a new problem and every weeknight a new research binge into how houses like this one were actually put together.
And what did I discover? Well, aside from discovering the limits of a person’s soul when taking on a project so epic it feels insurmountable, more concretely I discovered this: newspaper pages from the Bangor Daily News, November 23rd 1892, that had been used as some sort of flooring insulation or layer between the subfloor and floorboards, still burnt from the great Bangor fire of 1911.
People had built this house, several times. Checking the records, I was only the 4th owner. It had been built by a rich man for his daughter, they sold it to the local church in the 1930s, the church used it to house pastors until 2005, an older lady bought it and passed away and it was sold to me in 2020. Four owners. One house, originally built by local Maine coast shipbuilders.
I thought about them all the time as I spent nearly 2 years of labor taking great care to blend modern materials and methods with those of the past, in the way you think about someone who left a note in the wall for you to find, which they quite literally did. What would they make of the adhesive I was about to use? The cordless drill? The fact that I could Google “how to shim a sagging floor joist without cracking original plaster” and get forty-seven answers in six seconds?
I assumed the answer was “they would be horrified.” That I was defiling the craft. That real builders, the kind who did it with a hammer and the knowledge handed down from their forebearers, would see what I was doing as a cheat. I assumed this the way everyone in the current AI discourse assumes it: that the people who had done it the hard way would resent the people doing it the easy way.
So I looked it up. Why not, what else was lockdown good for other than rabbit holes.
What the Shipbuilders Actually Said
The coast of Maine in the middle 1800s was covered with shipbuilders. Bath. Damariscotta. Wiscasset. Searsport. They built the wooden ships that carried everything before steel and then steam took over. In the winter the coast froze up and the shipyards shut down, and the men who had been fitting futtocks and scarfing planks all summer picked up their tools and walked inland to build houses. And for a time, Bangor was one of the world’s most productive lumber sources. Not the country; the world.
And they built my house. They built most of them, in any stretch of the state that was within a day’s ride of saltwater. The houses have their fingerprints all over them. The framing is ship framing. The joinery is ship joinery. The way the stairs are mortised into the stringers is the way a ship’s ladder is mortised into a deck. In fact, the stairs into the attic are more than a shallow ladder, and if what I want to get up there can’t be disassembled to narrower than 23 inches, it ain’t going up, because that stairway is not even close to code width.
I thought, reasonably, that these would be the people who would side with the sacred-friction takes. Hand-cut. Hand-joined. Hand-nailed with nails they made in their own forges. Every board sawn from trees they felled themselves. Surely they, of all people, would be the ones to say: the bleeding is the point. The bleeding is what makes it real.
So, I went to the Bangor historic society and the Bangor Public Library, a massively outsized library for a town like this made only possible from generous donations from local author, Stephen King. I found letters. I read the trade journals and the shipyard records that survived. I read the accounts written by their sons and grandsons about what it was like to grow up watching them work. I want to tell you what I found, because it was the opposite of what I expected, and it has stayed with me ever since.
They were grateful.
Every new tool that showed up on the Maine coast between 1840 and 1920, they grabbed with both hands. The circular saw when it arrived in the 1860s. The steam-driven planer. The pneumatic drill. The portable generator. The nail gun, when it finally showed up in the twentieth century. Not one of them mourned the method it replaced. Not one of them wrote a letter to the trade paper explaining that the soul of the craft had died the day the planer came in.
When drywall replaced horsehair plaster (yes, the plaster on the walls is bound with horsehair), they wept with joy.
What they wrote about, instead, was their hands. The arthritis that was no longer inevitable. The fingers that were still attached to the fingers next to them. The evenings they got to spend with their children, because they were not still at the yard at eight o’clock trying to hand-plane a deck beam that a machine could have produced before lunch. They wrote about their backs and their eyes and their lungs. They wrote about the fifty-year-old men on their crews, who had previously been sixty-year-old bodies and who were now, suddenly, with the new tools, just fifty-year-old men again.
They measured their value by the house. Not the hammer.
Nobody Who Built Things Romanticizes the Suffering
My dad built houses for a living. I watched him do it for most of my childhood, which means I watched the American construction industry evolve in real time through the 1980s and into the 1990s, from the methods he had learned in the sixties and seventies to the methods that arrived, one by one, across my growing up.
You ever heard the sound of a .22 rifle shell being loaded into a Hilti gun to drive a nail into a slab of concrete? Thing of beauty. And the ker-chunk of pneumatic framing nailers. Pre-hung doors. Engineered joists. The first cordless drills that could actually drive a four-inch structural torx screw without quitting after six of them. I remember the year the crew stopped hand-nailing subfloor and started using coil nailers, because I remember my dad coming home at five-thirty instead of seven-thirty and being, for the first time in my memory, not exhausted in the specific way that framing for ten hours straight makes a man exhausted.
He did not mourn the hammer. It was now a sometimes tool, but framing a house with a hammer was unfathomable. But he didn’t miss the framing.
None of them did. I never once, in my entire childhood, heard a member of his crew say anything resembling “the new tools have killed real craftsmanship.” That sentiment did not exist on a job site. It did not exist in the trade magazines in the break-room rack. It did not exist in the conversations that happened at the lumberyard at six in the morning. The only people who ever said anything like that were the people who did not, themselves, have to frame a house that day.
The romanticization of toil comes from outside the work. Always. Without exception. The people who do the work know exactly what the friction cost them, and they are glad to be rid of it.
The designer who misses the hand-wireframing years is not the designer who drew wireframes ten hours a day. The writer who misses the typewriter is not the writer who had to retype a whole page because of one edit. The photographer who misses the darkroom is not the photographer who lost six months of shots to a mislabeled chemical. The craftsperson, the actual one, remembers exactly how much of the old friction was suffering that did not become skill.
So who is posting the “sacred friction” takes?
I have a guess.
The Puritan Work Ethic Wearing a Lanyard
The canard, phrased the way it usually shows up on my timeline, goes like this:
AI removes the friction that produces real learning. The value was always in the toil. Without the struggle, the outcome is hollow. Time spent is what makes a work great.
This is not a design philosophy. I have been staring at it for months trying to name what it actually is, and I think I finally have it.
It is the Puritan work ethic wearing a lanyard.
It is the belief that salvation requires suffering, applied to professional knowledge work and then handed a Figma license. The Protestant ethic (the ethic, not the theology) produced a generation of people who believed that unpleasant, disciplined labor was not just economically productive but morally cleansing. The more it hurt, the more it counted. The suffering was the receipt.
You can draw a straight line from Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister of colonial New England, through the assembly line through the eighty-hour workweek at a 1990s consultancy through the “sacred friction of craft” thread on LinkedIn. Mather preached a worldview where discipline, austerity, and relentless labor were signs of moral worth. Work was not just survival or productivity; it was evidence of being among the saved.
Same ethic. Same conviction that if the work did not cost you your body, your marriage, your weekends, your blood, then the work was not real, and neither was the result. Mather’s Puritan worldview fused morality with labor: discipline, hardship, and productivity became proxies for virtue. Work stopped being just work, it became a moral ledger.
By this logic:
A C-section is not really giving birth.
Digital art is not real art.
A meal made in a pressure cooker is not real cooking.
Writing on a word processor is not real writing.
An email is not a real letter.
An ebook is not a real book.
A vaccine is not really surviving the disease.
None of it counts, because none of it hurt enough.
That is the shape of the argument, with the mask off. The outcome is identical. The suffering was reduced. And the person who suffered more insists that the person who suffered less does not deserve the result. This also applies to the idea that time, friction, and “process” is required as well. The houses of Maine in the late 1800’s took a year or more to finish. The acceleration of that process because of new tools and techniques didn’t create any less quality, value or meaning. It also didn’t create any more.
It is incoherent, if you sit with it for ten seconds. Nobody proposes that we reintroduce hand-copying to bring back the soul of literature. Nobody suggests we return to the slide rule to make engineers more rigorous. Nobody, in any other domain, believes that the amount of pain a thing caused is the measure of the thing that came out. But somehow, when the tool that got easier is the one used by knowledge workers with a public profile, the old argument comes roaring back in business casual.
The bleeding was not the point. It never was.
Conservatism
Underneath the Puritan ethic is something even older and even more structural. It is conservatism.
Not the political kind. That is just one application of it, and not always the most honest one. What I mean is the structural kind. The cognitive pattern. The word itself tells you what it is: to conserve. To preserve. To hold.
What I have come to believe, after watching a lot of design leaders and a lot of senior engineers and a lot of established practitioners across a lot of disciplines react to a lot of tools that threatened their sense of their own role, is this. The person who insists the old process was better is almost never actually defending the process. They are defending their position inside the process.
It sounds like an accusation of bad faith, and I am not making an accusation of bad faith. I am describing a mechanism I have also felt from inside of it.
What the old system gave the senior person was legibility. Mastery. Status. The knowledge of exactly where you stood in the hierarchy, exactly what your skills were worth, exactly who you were in the ecosystem. You had paid the price. You had done the time. The system had assigned you a role, and the role came with legibility, which is one of the deepest needs a working adult has.
The new system has not assigned that role yet. It may not, in the exact shape of the old one, ever assign it at all. And uncertainty about your own role feels, inside your body, identical to loss. The amygdala does not distinguish between “my role is disappearing” and “an opportunity is arriving that I do not yet know how to take.” Both produce the same cortisol. Both make the same shape in the chest at four in the morning when you cannot sleep.
The person who posts about the death of craftsmanship is often, if you listen carefully, posting about the death of their own position in a craft they had finally mastered. That is not contemptible. That is human. But it is not the same thing as an argument.
The shipbuilders in Maine did not conserve the old methods. They abandoned them the moment something better arrived, because they were builders, not traditionalists. They measured their value by the house, not the hammer. And, honestly, because the old methods hurt.
The Friction Moved Upstream
So here is what is actually happening, which is not what the sacred-friction crowd thinks is happening. AI has not removed friction. It has relocated it.
The friction used to live downstream. In the execution. In the pushing of pixels and the writing of boilerplate and the hand-alignment of a grid and the re-creation of every asset at every breakpoint. In the ten-hour Thursday-afternoon stretch where you did something mechanical and slow because no machine could yet do it for you.
That friction is leaving. Some of it is already gone. But the friction as a category did not leave. It moved. It moved to the places it should have been all along, which is to say the places where the question is hard and the machine cannot answer it for you.
What to build. For whom. Why now. What it will mean for this specific person’s Tuesday. Whether it is any good at all.
This is harder work than the old downstream friction. Not less work. Harder work. The old friction was time and sweat applied to a known problem. The new friction is discernment applied to a problem that does not yet have a shape. You cannot grind your way through it the way you could grind through a hand-built wireframe. You cannot bleed it out in a sprint. It requires experience, strategy, context, empathy, and an ability to tell when the thing you are making is actually worth making at all, which is an ability nobody in the old pipeline was required to exercise, because the pipeline itself decided what got made.
Which is, if you think about it, why so many of the people raised in the old pipeline are so disoriented right now. They were excellent executors of a brief someone else wrote. The machine does the executing now. The writing of the brief was always the hard part. It just was not, for them, their job.
The people mourning the downstream friction are mourning the part they understood. They had twenty years of practice at the old friction. They had none at the new one, because the old system did not ask them to have any. And rather than learn the new friction, which is genuinely harder and genuinely more exposing, they are calling its absence the death of craftsmanship.
It is not the death of craftsmanship. It is the redirection of craftsmanship into the one place craftsmanship should have been the whole time, which is the discernment about what is worth making in the first place.
AI has added more process, more learning, and more ownership to the work than the old way ever did. It has also added more ways to be wrong, which is a thing people rarely say out loud. The old way gave you ways to be slow. The new way gives you ways to be wrong quickly. Those are not the same, and the second one is harder to bear, because speed turns every weak decision into a visible mistake in a matter of hours instead of quarters.
But only if you are willing to see it. And only if you are willing to put the old hammer down.
The House Was the Point
I am still in the colonial, in a manner of speaking. I finished the restoration in the second year of the lockdown. The floor is level. The wiring is to code. There is a 85” TV and a heat pump and every other boring modern convenience, because I built this place to live in, not to reenact.
When I think about the shipbuilders who framed the original house, I no longer think about what they would make of my adhesives. I think about the letters they wrote to their wives when the circular saw arrived in town. I think about the evenings they got back. The bodies they got to keep. The houses they built faster, and better, and with less of their own blood in the walls.
They were not traditionalists. They were builders. They took from all that was around them and made with it something more.
You do not have to romanticize the friction you learned to survive. You do not have to pretend the bleeding was the point in order to have earned your own mastery. You can put the hammer down, the one you spent twenty years learning to swing, and you can pick up the new tool, and it will not unmake the work you already did. It will add to it. The thing you learned by doing the old work was not the friction itself. It was the experience underneath the friction. The friction leaves. The discernment comes with you.
Me personally? I wish I was able to just restore colonials to modern standards full time. Real things in the real world. I don’t know where I fit in the AI era ahead, a jane-of-all-trades who is great at learning new technology rapidly and writing polemic essays is not a “job” title, sort of how your favorite professor in college still worked nights at the comic book store. But, my goal isn’t to adapt to fit into a system. My goal is to look at something like a 130 year old un-restored colonial home, take from all that is around it, and make of it something more. A home.
The bleeding was never the point. The home was the point.
Interesting read as always!
Discernment is absolutely the bottom line skill everyone needs but I still worry about how the bright-eyed bushy-tailed newbies coming into any new practice, anywhere, will handle things without some idea of how and why they work.
I'd be interested in what the Bangor shipbuilders, and your dad, thought about that.