Woodworking and AI

My reflection on the balance between tradition, technology, and touch.

As an Engineer and woodworker I am always looking to blend different pieces of technology and craft together. I even had AI assist in writing this with me, with a lot of effort and fine tuning, these are my thoughts on using AI or different features and functions of AI to help elevate your craft, business, or even just free up more time for you to make in your shop

The Distance Between Hand and Machine

There’s a moment, just before a cut, when the shop goes quiet. You line up the mark, feel the weight of the saw, breathe once, and let the teeth do their work. That sound — steady, deliberate — is older than any of us. It’s the sound of thought turning into motion.

That rhythm has carried me through every kind of day. Good ones, where the grain cooperates and the joints close up tight. And the bad ones — the splintered edges, the tear-out, the glue-ups that somehow still go wrong. You live long enough with wood, and you realize it’s less about perfection and more about patience. The grain always has something to teach, even when it’s fighting you.

So when I hear talk about artificial intelligence making its way into woodworking, I feel that same mix of curiosity and caution that’s followed every big shift in the craft. I’ve seen plenty of “next big things” come and go — new glues, new finishes, new machines that promised to make the old ways obsolete. None of them ever did.

But AI feels different. It doesn’t just add another tool to the bench — it adds another kind of thinking entirely. It doesn’t hold a chisel or plane a board. It looks at patterns, trends, and data — things invisible to the human eye — and makes predictions, designs, even decisions.

And that’s where it gets interesting.

Because woodworking, at its heart, has always been about that conversation between mind and material. We measure, we plan, but we also feel. We make thousands of micro-adjustments that no computer could ever fully account for. You can’t code intuition — that subtle moment when you just know the chisel angle needs to shift a hair, or that the finish needs another hour before buffing.

So where does something like AI fit in a world built on intuition, patience, and touch?

That’s the question I keep circling back to.

If I’m honest, the first time I thought about “AI in woodworking,” I laughed. The image in my head was a robot fumbling a dovetail. But the more I thought about it — and the more I saw AI reshape other fields — the harder it was to shrug off.

Maybe it’s not here to replace craftsmanship. Maybe it’s here to challenge what craftsmanship means.

And maybe that’s worth paying attention to.

Craft in the Age of AI Code

To understand what AI might bring to woodworking, you first have to understand what’s sacred about it.

It’s not just the finished piece. It’s the process — the hours alone in the shop, the slow rhythm of shaping something that resists being rushed. It’s learning to read the wood like a language — how the grain flows, where it wants to split, what direction it prefers to bend. The best woodworkers I know don’t impose their will on the material. They negotiate with it.

That’s what makes the craft feel alive.

AI doesn’t understand that kind of relationship. It doesn’t wait for glue to cure. It doesn’t sharpen a blade or nurse a bruised knuckle. It knows nothing of the little rituals that fill a workshop — the way you tap the mallet twice before every cut, or keep your favorite chisel just a little sharper than the rest.

But maybe that’s not what it’s trying to replace.

Right now, AI shows up mostly in design software. Programs like Fusion 360, Rhino, and SketchUp are already incorporating algorithms that can generate countless variations of a form — chairs, tables, joinery systems — and test them for strength, balance, and material efficiency. You feed it the parameters, and it floods you with options. Some are impractical. Some are wild. And every now and then, one feels fresh, like something you might have drawn if you hadn’t been boxed in by habit.

That’s the value of it — it helps us see beyond our own patterns.

It can also save time in places that aren’t sacred. Predicting wood movement based on humidity, optimizing board layouts to reduce waste, simulating how a joint will respond under load — these are the kinds of tasks that don’t feed the soul, but can quietly make or break a project.

If AI can take some of that weight, maybe it frees us to spend more time on the parts that do feed the soul — the details, the finish, the design choices that make a piece truly ours.

Thinking about it from a design persepective, it can quickly assist in different types of iterative approaches to designs or joinery, a base plate to work from that you can then refine as the maker into your preferred style.

AI isn’t the artist. It’s the spark. The randomness of it can shake us out of our routines, nudge us toward new directions. The same way a new tool changes how you think about joinery, or a new type of wood forces you to adapt your technique.

It’s easy to forget how every “traditional” tool we use was once new, too. The first woodworkers to use saws instead of axes were probably accused of cheating. The same with planes, or metal nails, or electricity. Every innovation feels like a threat to the old way — until the old way finds a way to live alongside it.

Maybe AI is just another chapter in that same story.

Still, there’s a risk.

If you let AI run the show, you lose the small imperfections that make a piece feel human. The slight asymmetry that gives a chair life. The tiny variation in a hand-carved surface that catches light differently. Those things don’t show up in data models. They live in the hands, in the rhythm of work, in the pauses between motions.

AI doesn’t pause. It never breathes, never hesitates, never wonders.

That’s where we come in.

Our role might not be to outthink the machine, but to reintroduce humanity into what it produces. To keep the irregularities, the gestures, the warmth. To remind the work that it’s still made by people who care.

Because at the end of the day, what separates a well-made table from a soulless one isn’t the precision of the joinery — it’s the intent behind it.

And no algorithm, however advanced, can reproduce intent.

The Workshop Ahead (Woodworking with AI)

If you were to walk into my shop right now, you’d see the entire history of woodworking sharing one space. There’s an old Stanley hand plane on the bench that once belonged to my grandfather, its wooden handle polished smooth from years of use. Next to it, a digital caliper. The router hums quietly in the background, while a laptop on the shelf runs CAD software.

It’s all there — past, present, and future, tangled together in sawdust.

I think that’s what the next generation of woodworking will look like: a blend. Not a replacement of one by the other, but a merging — where old instincts and new tools find a rhythm together.

AI could easily become part of that blend.

Imagine a shop where an AI system monitors temperature and humidity, keeping your wood stable without you ever checking a hygrometer. Where your saws and planers send data about blade sharpness and vibration, warning you when something’s just a little off. Where your design software suggests joinery tweaks that add strength without changing your aesthetic.

None of that takes the soul out of woodworking. It just gives you a better foundation to build on.

And for small shops — the one- or two-person operations — that kind of help could be transformative. It could level the playing field, giving independent makers access to the same kinds of precision and analysis that big studios use. It could make your workflow smarter, your time better spent, your business more resilient.

But here’s the part that matters most: even in that imagined future, someone still has to pick up the board. Someone has to choose which piece of walnut gets the spotlight, which knot to feature and which to cut around. Someone has to decide what feels right.

That’s the craft. That’s what endures.

AI might become a powerful collaborator, but it will never know what it means to care about the work. It won’t feel that quiet pride when a client runs their hand over a finish and smiles. It won’t remember how the wood sounded when you first cut into it. It won’t feel the weight of the piece when you lift it off the bench, realizing it finally balances just the way you hoped it would.

Those are human things. Beautiful, stubborn, irreplaceable human things.

And maybe that’s why I’ve stopped thinking about AI as a threat. I think of it more as a mirror. It shows us what parts of our process are mechanical — the steps we repeat without thinking — and what parts are truly alive. It reminds us that what makes woodworking timeless isn’t the tools, but the people behind them.

If AI can help us spend more time on those human parts — the design, the storytelling, the connection — then maybe it’s worth welcoming into the shop.

It might not ever smell the cedar or feel the curl of a perfect shaving, but it can still lend a hand in its own quiet, invisible way.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.

Because in the end, woodworking has never really been about resisting change. It’s been about holding onto what matters while learning how to work with what’s new.

AI might never understand what drives someone to spend ten hours sanding a tabletop just to get the light to dance across it the right way. But it can help you get to that moment with a little more clarity, a little more precision, maybe even a little more joy.

If that helps you build better work, elevate your shop, or simply buy yourself more time to chase the parts of the craft that matter most — then yes, I think AI has its place.

Not as a master, not even as an equal, but as one more tool among many.

The hands still make the work. The heart still gives it meaning.

And as long as that’s true, I don’t think we have anything to fear. #woodworking #woodworkingai #ai #machinelearning #tradition #craft