What construction is

Construction is the laying of brick.

The machine is good at it. Often better than I am. It lays brick more evenly, more patiently, in more styles, across longer stretches. Without tiring. Without getting bored. Without having a bad afternoon because the dog was sick in the night. If you give the machine an architecture, it will build you a great deal of building, and the building will mostly be well made.

I want to say that plainly, because a lot of the writing about these tools is a kind of quiet refusal to admit it. People will say the machine's prose is competent but soulless. They will say it lacks the spark. They will say you can always tell. You cannot always tell. Some of what you are reading now was typed by a machine, and some of it was typed by me, and I am not going to tell you which. The distinction is not the point. Pretending the distinction is always obvious is one of the things we should stop pretending.

What the machine cannot do is decide what to build. It can only build what has been architected. When what has been architected is vague, the machine will build something vague that looks definite, which is worse than vague, because it fools the builder and sometimes fools the architect.

The machine will lay brick in the wrong place if the architecture is wrong. It will also lay brick in the wrong place if the architecture is right and the architect has stopped paying attention. You cannot hand the machine a good design and leave. You have to stay on site and look at every wall as it goes up and ask whether the wall is the wall you meant.

If you do not, the building drifts. A little at first. Then a lot. And you arrive at the end of a month and find the building is not the one you designed, and it is too late to fix, because too much brick has been laid on the wrong foundation to take it all down.

The beginner thinks the machine is a genie. You make a wish. The genie gives you the thing. The experienced architect knows the machine is a builder, and a builder needs supervision. Not because the builder is bad. Because the builder does not know what you meant. The builder only knows what you said. And what you said is never quite what you meant, because what you meant lives in the held intention, which is in your body and not in your words.