Five Dollars a Foot

My dad brought out a big yellow box. It had rounded corners and dimpled plastic. It was sturdy, and I could tell it was protecting something important inside.

It was my third day ever on a construction site, and since everything was new to me, my dad told me to watch, listen, and observe.

There was another new guy on site, Tomasz. It was his second day. On the car ride in, I'd overheard that he was educated as an engineer and loved building.

On the job, my dad would yell out commands without much context. "Three-six," my dad said.

Tomasz headed to the chop saw. After a loud roar, he came back, and dropped pieces of hat-track on the ground. Hat-track are pieces of steel shaped like a hat when seen from the side. They come bundled together and can be cut to size all at the same time.

"There you go," he gruffed.

My dad looked down from his stilts.

"Well? Is one of you going to pass it up?"

I looked over. Tomasz was already walking around the corner. That was my cue. I rushed over, grabbed the whole pile, and held it up to my dad.

"ONE AT A TIME!"

I tried to pull one piece of hat-track loose, but they were stuck together. My dad leaned down, took the bundle out of my hands, and smacked it against the column. The pieces scattered across the floor.

He held one piece against the angle with just his fingertips. With his head still turned toward me, he screwed it in. Without missing a beat, he stuck out his hand and beaconed me to hand him the next piece, but I just stared.

"Well!? What are you waiting for?"

The dots connected. I dropped to my knee, grabbed a piece, and held it up in the air.

He grunted. "In my hand. You pass the pieces into my HAND."

I stood up and put the piece in his palm. He set it on the angle, bzzt, screwed it in, shot his hand my way again. I scrambled for the next piece. Then, the next.

Nobody explained anything. I just had to keep up.

A few minutes later, my dad held the angle against the hanging hat-track, looked over at the column corner, and swore under his breath. Out came the measuring tape. You'd be surprised how rarely a tape comes out on a site. When it does, something's wrong.

"Tomasz! Come here!"

Tomasz came around the corner like he'd been hiding. "What?"

"What dimension did I give you?"

"Thirty-six."

"No. I said three-six. Three foot six."

"No. You said thirty-six."

The voices got louder. Then they both turned to me.

"What did I say?"

I said I wasn't sure. But in my head, I'd heard thirty-six too.

Tomasz took off his pouch. "I can't do this. This isn't for me." And he walked off the site. I never saw him again.

It didn't matter who was right. The pieces were still the wrong length.

And just like that, the saw was my job. I cut, I passed. I learned.

After the fourth bulkhead, my dad told me to bring the laser.

"The laser? What the hell is that?"

"It's in the yellow box. Be careful. It's expensive."

I unbuckled the latches and opened it up. Inside was Styrofoam from edge-to-edge, and nestled in the middle, sat a device maybe twice the size of a baseball. I handed it up.

My dad set it against the wall, switched it on, and a perfectly straight holographic line appeared. He built the rest of the bulkhead off that line, faster than anything I'd seen all day.

On the drive home, he asked me what I thought.

"It was really cool," I said. "With that laser, you go so much faster. You must make so much money."

He chuckled. "Before lasers, we got five dollars a foot for bulkheads. After the laser came out, we got three."

Years later, I'm building HrdHat on my own, with AI. And I keep coming back to the lesson I learned that day. Nobody hands you a manual. The tools change every week. You figure it out by keeping up, one piece at a time.

The first time AI built exactly what I asked for, it turned out to be completely wrong, and I thought of Tomasz. I said, "three-six." It heard, "thirty-six." Arguing about who is right doesn't fix anything, because the pieces are still the wrong length. So now I'm specific in my use of language to minimize miscommunication. I also always check, and then, I check again.

Some people are confronted with the messy process of building – whether on a physical site or with their AI – and they take off their metaphorical pouch, and walk. That's fine. It's not for everyone. But the ones who stay, learn to work with the tool instead of against it.

And then there's the laser. Everyone's talking about how much faster they can work with the help of AI, and I agree; but speed gets priced in. Once everyone has access to a laser, building the bulkhead pays three dollars a foot, not five. The tool alone isn't the advantage. Knowing the tool well enough to make it work to your advantage is.

AI is the new yellow box. I'm opening it carefully, because it has its advantages but it also comes with consequences, and I'll be writing down what I learn here.

Let's watch, listen, observe.