An essay made the rounds earlier this year titled Tool Shaped Objects, by Will Manidis, discussing a trend, however momentary, where people appeared to be using artificial intelligence to feel productive rather than as a means to tangible ends. It was met with varying degrees of fanfare and critique, but for us it was as much of a wakeup call as it was a warning—that in the frothy churn of a technology industry gone ballistic, the toolmaker's obligation to the hand that holds the tool had appeared to become almost optional, or at least unresolved. Why is this happening? Maybe we fear the final *tool—*the one that thinks and acts and manipulates, and at some point, before long, simply does the job. Does every job, and makes us obsolete. No more tools, no more toolmakers. No more meaning.

Of course, none of this is certain, and obsolescence, if it comes, does not arrive everywhere all at once. Nor does it stay in the corner of industry where it started. It arrives in an order, percolating outward and downward into every economy and every craft, but not manifesting the same way everywhere. Where the work is knowledge-based, the machine reached the center of the craft first. These are things like writing, analysis, and code. The part where the meaning lived. What it has left less-scathed is the work around the work: the coordination, administration, overhead. We have started calling this orchestration, and it is the job description most software engineers are coming to adopt. Where the work is embodied, however, we see a sort of inversion.

For the trades, the center happens in crawlspaces and on rooftops, with hands. The work around the work is the office: the scheduling, dispatch, and paperwork that devours the evenings. These are the things the machine reaches first, and that work is being solved right now, just out of reach but not for much longer. It is hidden behind the AI industry’s own benchmarks—task-completion time horizons, tool-use reliability and domain-specific reasoning. Combined, these measures look a lot like an admin’s job, and that is the work we are doing at Onsite. The office moves on site, quite literally, while meaning stays where it has always been: in the hands.

But for how long?

We can’t pretend to know, though we are confident that the trades do maintain a degree of insulation from the coming automation wave. After all, atoms are harder than bits, and the embodied-machine future is far enough out that the getting-your-hands-dirty part of the job is not yet in question (which itself is a strange irony, given that we are in the foothills of what many argue is a new industrial revolution). As such, the trades have been granted foresight. Very few crafts in history have watched a wave arrive with this much warning, and while none of us gets a vote on whether the wave comes, we all get a vote on what gets built in the meantime, and for whom.

At Onsite, we are casting ours, and in doing so would like to return to the unresolved obligation this essay opened with. We build for people whose tools have been honed over generations, and we strive toward that same standard of quality and usefulness. The bar is old and it is simple: a tool produces work. A tool shaped object produces the feeling of it. Nobody performs productivity with a pipe wrench, and nobody should perform it with software either. But why hold ourselves to this? We have an economic incentive to be on the trades' side. We also have an existential one. We see work itself as essential to the people who do it. Work is one of the last functioning meaning-making institutions most people have, and the trades are unusually rich in its more colorful manifestations. A society’s health is predicated on the ability of its people to find and maintain purpose within its bounds. We have a vested interest in the people, the work, and the crafts that hold it up.

“Very few crafts in history have watched a wave arrive with this much warning, and while none of us gets a vote on whether the wave comes, we all get a vote on what gets built in the meantime, and for whom.”

And meaning, like work, has counterfeits. If a tool shaped object produces the feeling of work without the work, a meaning shaped object produces the feeling of purpose without the purpose. We are surrounding ourselves with them: digital replacements for conversation, for relationships, for camaraderie and brotherhood and sisterhood. Against that backdrop, the small acts of humanity that were overlooked or taken for granted are becoming hugely impactful on an ordinary day. Maybe it was never fair to draw the line where everyone draws it, with knowledge work on one side and manual labor on the other. It is deep knowledge, tacit knowledge, that drives these practices: the ability to listen, the attention to detail, the reliability. A technician arrives to relieve someone of the worst day or their month or their year. They also come to look that person in the eye, living and breathing and smiling in the doorway, and offer the simple fact of presence. No replacement is shaped like that. It is the most powerful tool in the truck, and the one that makes its owner irreplaceable.

The job description is changing deeper into the craft. The work ahead, for us, is building the tools that let tradespeople become what the world is asking them to become.

Use your hands for what you trained them for.