I like to tell certain stories by starting with something grounded 1 and proceed towards the parts that sound increasingly deranged. 2

Sometimes people ask if I knit. (normal so far). I tell them no, not like they are thinking, but I have a home knitting machine(modestly novel). It's a nice one, one of the fanciest ever made; computerized (ok, that must be a thing knitting machines can be) with 555 built in patterns (aha! a reason for the computer). If you want to load patterns, you can do so via a low voltage serial link (?) to a single sided (??) single density (??!!!) three and a half inch floppy drive. (!)

Which brings me to our point. Nobody has made these things since the late eighties / early nineties. There's a few of the most basic models available had new, but the category is categorically obsolete.

Of course, there are still plenty of knitting machines in the world. You are almost certainly wearing something knit right now: a t-shirt or undergarment, most probably. But they're made with industrial knitting machines, running in factories. We buy our clothes from the store.

the promises and perils of mechanization

The home knitting machine is faster than knitting by hand, and almost always more consistent. It makes certain hard things (colorwork, patterns, slip stitch textures) almost effortless. I can take something I made on the machine and show it to a hand-knitter who doesn't know anything about the machines and she will say "wow, this looks really good."3

Some limitations, however, become apparent:

  • Casting on and casting off are still manual.
  • Basic equipment gives you a stockinette stitch only; purls require a ribber and garter stitch requires a strange low speed electric attachment. Stockinette stitch tends to curl when it isn't a circlular tube like a stocking, but...
  • It only knits flat shapes, mostly rectangles (you can add or drop stitches to make new shapes with extensive manipulation, but don't expect to make socks, or hats, at least not the way people usually knit socks and hats.)
  • Attaching the rectangles (or other shapes) means a seam, and you need additional equipment (linker, or sewing machine, etc).
  • The machine only has one gauge of knitting. If you want a chunky sweater, you need to buy a separate machine. If you want a finer knit, you need to buy a separate machine.
  • The machine has much more stringent demands on the yarn that is used with it.

And there's one more very important one that isn't a limitation exactly, just something that's missing. You may wonder about the different stitch types I mentioned above: knit, purl. I would explain more, except, I don't know how to knit.4 And I were an expert knitter, and began to machine knit exclusively, I'd probably get rusty at certain traditional techniques. It's the practice of skills that's missing here. It's not entirely gone, but it's very different, and much reduced.

Does any of this sound familiar yet, Claude?

the conspicuous absence of knitting employment

For a while there was a commercial side to the home knitting machine, in the form of piecework: a company would send you a pattern, you'd knit it up and send it back and get paid. This hasn't happened in decades. The industry is automated.

Last I heard there were three industrial knitting machines in community makerspaces. There is one somewhere in New Orleans (I didn't catch the name of the makerspace), there is one in San Francisco in the (in)famous Noisebridge, slightly damaged5, and there's one in Sequoia Fabrica, a Noisebridge breakaway.6 I have made a few samples on this last one; the software is more than a little abstreuse, and there are very few experts in this part of the world.

This machine shares some of the limitations of the domestic one, extends some others (more colors!) and if set up right it will work continuously for hours. You can run it as a factory operation. When it needs attention it sounds a little alarm and lights up an indicator on a mast so that it's visible. However, none of this takes place in the United States, as costs are lower elsewhere.

Claude in a loop7 can be deployed to run on a secure locked down VM8 or similar environment, with minimal networking access strict allow-lists, and carefully managed permissions structures. If given a good enough pattern to work from -- a decent architectural standard, an ample set of design constraints, etc -- it can achieve amazing things. Agents are occasionally smart, but they're really pretty dumb; agents in a loop writing tests against a reference implementation or a goal state can catch their mistakes. They may still need attention, and ideally you'd get some sort of an, a little alarm that lights up an indicator so that it's visible.

unsettling implications if the analogy extends to tech

I like the home knitting machine, and I am glad I tried it, because it got me excited about fabric as material, and helped opened up the doors of creativity. But I approached it as a hobbyist decades after its heyday, definitely not as a job. There is very little money to be made by its operation. I've seen a few unusual garments on Etsy here and there which seem to be made this way.

So when you run Claude or Cursor or Codex or Collate or what-have-you, I'd like to know: Are you using AI like a home knitting machine? Or more like a factory designer? Because the "dark factory" pattern -- the one without you, the human, as middleman -- is coming some day, the one where the AI can run and actually figure out all the stuff you're doing right now, with much less supervision. I'm not sure how soon. It doesn't seem like an easy problem to solve common sense, and a working model of the world, but I've been really surprised by the advances in just the past year -- so who knows? It could be released by Christmas.

Of course, modern factories (dark or otherwise) still have designers making everything happen, people who work hard to understand the processes and materials, to design new blends of fiber with better properties -- and these designers and engineers have much in common with fine craftsmen who routinely achieve wonders with their knitting, not merely because it's made with love, but because it's made with techniques that a factory would never bother to try. And there's people who design and build the factory equipment, too.

But that middle layer, where you function as a line worker, using personal-scale equipment in a semi-automated way, whether correcting for its faults and foibles or just letting them slip through as slop that's someone else's problem... where the manager leans on you to deliver more with less, and focus on output, and for the love of God stop trying to figure out how to work smarter.

In other words: go deskill yourself.

...

... I don't know about you, but I think that is an absolutely untenable position to be in. If this is your manager's approach to your job, then I hope you are working on plans for a change... or else not just for for mid-term9 unemployment, but for absolute unemployability.1011 There's certainly still a role for human supervision in the world that's coming, but I've got to think it's going to be a really small one.

  1. I once had an apartment in Manhattan! ↩

  2. It was just off Main Street, it had a roof deck overlooking the East River, to the west; I commuted via cable car, it had a land border with Tuvalu. ↩

  3. "Thanks. I cheated." ↩

  4. I do know a little bit about the stitch types, mostly that stockinette wants to curl in a saddle-shape, that purl stitches near the edge may be able to relieve some of the curl, and that some pattern of alternating knits and purls is involved in ribbing, that stuff at the end of your sleeves or the bottom of your sweatshirt... hence the term "ribber". ↩

  5. They didn't lubricate it right, and the machine got jammed and destroyed some of the needle selectors. Normally you only expect to replace the needle tips, not the selectors. At the time that it broke I was visiting Noisebridge for the very first time and seeing such a knitting machine for the very first time, and I was also the most knowledgable person in the room about its mechanical properties. Noisebridge's anarcho-syndicalism is one of the premises of all time, but I must say, it seems to have some serious flaws as deployed in a hobbyist-grade arrangement. ↩

  6. I'm the girl who paid for this machine's shipping. ↩

  7. And no doubt others, but I like Claude. ↩

  8. (because you're not stupid) ↩

  9. Again, I don't know how soon it happens, but I wonder: at the breakneck pace the industry is changing, how long can it take? ↩

  10. Or perhaps plans to get the technology banned entirely -- a tall order. ↩

  11. Some people will say to unionize. I have doubts. If there are knitting-machine operator unions in the US, they're pretty obscure. This suggests that there may be limitations on this approach, at last until it becomes some mass-populism thing, and then it's an entirely different set of political-concerns. ↩