Tom has never really used a hand saw.
He has seen it working. Clean cuts, straight lines, wood behaving as if it wanted to cooperate. But he had never felt what it takes to get there – the resistance, the small corrections, the way a cut slowly drifts if you stop paying attention for even a second.
Still, when he walked into the workshop and saw the chainsaw on the wall, he reached for that.
Why wouldn’t he?
That same morning, Daniel opened his laptop.
He had never written a proper argument from scratch. Not one that held together from start to finish. Because structuring thoughts felt heavy. Slow. Slightly uncomfortable in a way that’s easy to avoid.
But now he had something better. He opened his LLM tool and started typing.
Tom pulled the cord. The chainsaw started instantly – loud, vibrating, almost impatient.
He lowered it into the wood. It cut fast. Faster than he expected.
There was no gradual feedback like with a hand saw. No “feel” for what was happening. Just motion. Power. Noise. The cut moving forward whether he understood it or not.
The line drifted a little. He corrected, but too sharply. The blade jerked.
At this moment, he wasn’t guiding the tool. He was reacting to it.
Daniel entered the prompt and hit Enter. Text appeared immediately. Well-structured. Confident. Honestly, better than what he would have written himself.
He skimmed it. It sounded right.
He didn’t check the assumptions. Didn’t follow the reasoning all the way through. There was no friction forcing him to slow down, so he didn’t. He copied it and adjusted a sentence or two. It felt good enough.
For a moment, he wasn’t thinking. He was reacting to output.
Back in the workshop, Tom stepped away.
The beam was technically cut. But the line wasn’t straight. One section was deeper than it should be. There was a mark where the blade had kicked sideways. Nothing catastrophic.
But close enough to imagine it. He stood there for a second longer than necessary. It was obvious it wasn’t the chainsaw’s fault.
Daniel published the report. It got attention. Likes, comments, a few e-mails saying “great insight.”
For a while, that was enough. Then someone asked a simple question. Not aggressive, just thought about that precisely. And suddenly the reasoning in the report didn’t hold.
One assumption was off. A small one, but it carried through the whole argument. The kind of thing you catch only if you actually think it through yourself. But Daniel didn’t.
The original problem was that the output looked solid.
Tom went back to the wall and picked up the hand saw. It felt uneasy, underwhelming. So quiet and so slow. Almost primitive compared to what he had just used.
He started cutting. At first, it was strange. The blade did not follow the line perfectly. He had to adjust – slightly left, slightly right. The wood pushed back in a way the chainsaw never had time to reveal.
But after a while, something changed. He could feel the cut.
Daniel opened a blank document. He used no prompt and no assistance. Just the keyboard.
The first paragraph was clumsy. The second one didn’t quite connect. He rewrote parts of it. Then again. It was slower than anything he had done recently. But this time, he could see where each idea came from.
The chainsaw wasn’t the problem. It never is.
And AI isn’t the problem either.
Both are incredible tools. They remove friction, increase speed, and make things possible in much faster way.
But they also remove the resistance that teaches what we are doing.
A chainsaw doesn’t teach us how to cut straight. AI doesn’t teach us how to think clearly.
They assume you already can. And we can’t do that, they don’t compensate.
They amplify.
Tom will probably use the chainsaw again. Daniel will very likely use AI again.
The question is whether, somewhere along the way, they learn to feel the resistance first. Because once you remove friction too early, you don’t just move faster. You lose the only feedback that was keeping you grounded in reality, that was keeping you from fooling yourself.
When you are working with a tool, who is in control?
