Does It Count as Making a Thing?

I saw a video the other day where someone spent ten minutes agonizing over whether what they were doing "counted" as making a thing. They were using a 3D printer to print parts for a project. The comments were full of people telling them it didn't count.

I make things with hand tools and power tools. I write code that writes other code. I shoot film and I shoot digital in my photography. I've used a table saw and a hand plane on the same project, in the same afternoon. Not once has the thing I made asked me how I made it.

The question of whether it counts is never really about the thing. It's about who gets to be in the club.

Someone Else's Game

If you're asking whether what you're doing counts as making, that's a strong sign you've wandered into someone else's game. And, that can be fine. Games have rules, and if you set out to play one — competitive woodworking, traditional darkroom printing, hand-coded-everything web development — then the constraints are part of the point. You chose those constraints because they're where the interesting problems live.

But, if you didn't choose that game, and you're just worried about what someone will say, that's a different situation entirely. That's not a craft question. That's a social anxiety.

I have spent decades making things across enough different domains to know that the gatekeeping follows the same pattern in every single one of them. The acceptable methods are always the ones the person doing the gatekeeping already knows. The unacceptable ones are always the newer thing they haven't learned yet, or the thing that makes their particular skill less scarce.

The Gatekeepers

Photographers who shoot film will tell you digital doesn't count. Developers who memorized APIs will tell you that using an AI assistant doesn't count. Follow that chain far enough and nobody's making anything, because somebody somewhere had to mine the ore for the chisel that shaped the wood that became the workbench you're being told you have to use or it doesn't count.

The people telling you it doesn't count share a few traits. They've built identity around a specific process. They feel that identity threatened when the process becomes less exclusive. And, they have confused the difficulty of their particular method with the value of the output.

That last one is worth sitting with. Difficulty is not value. It can contribute to value — the specific qualities of a hand-cut dovetail exist because of the process. But, difficulty alone isn't the point. If it were, we'd all be cutting lumber with stone tools and feeling superior about it.

The Decisions, Not the Tools

I use AI for some of my work. I use hand planes for other parts of it. I use a camera that's older than most of the people arguing about this stuff online, and I also use one that was manufactured last year. In none of these cases has the tool made the decisions for me. In all of them, the thing I made is the result of hundreds of choices I made about what to do, how to do it, and when to stop.

The interesting part — the part that's actually yours — is always the decisions.

The question worth asking isn't "does this count?" It's "did I make the thing I wanted to make?"

Because the people telling you it doesn't count are never the ones making interesting work. They're the ones patrolling the borders of a territory they've staked out, making sure nobody gets in without paying the toll they paid. That's not craft. That's a homeowner's association for creative work.