This is not about pottery. This is about AI, of course.
My job has changed from what I started doing 16 years ago, and from what I know existed before it.
I am a potter. I made pots by hand before — I had to know how to spin the wheel and how to mix soil into clay. I thought it was a revolution when motorised wheels and packaged clay came in. The job got easy. It got so easy that everyone could now do it. Bootcamps let anyone switch into pottery. Jobs aplenty. Money flowed.
This time it’s different.
Get this.
I no longer have to use my hands to make a pot. I can open a chat with Claude and ask it to make a pot. And the pot is there. Glazed and ready, even.
People still buy those pots — they work the same. They break if you drop them, but they’re fine otherwise. I need only 3 hours of focus a day to make as many pots as I used to make in a day.
I don’t know how many people would need pots. Or maybe they get a Claude subscription and start making them themselves.
I am loving how I work every day; making pots is fun again! But I can’t really enjoy it. I wonder how long this summer will last. I enjoy that I spend only 3 hours a day doing this job. I use the free time to do laundry. I know people could get a Claude subscription and make these pots by themselves. Not enough people are aware of it, or hopefully they never learn. I wonder how long they would need me typing prompts to make pots.
Some people call it vibepotting. But I beg to differ: it is only vibepotting if you do not know what your pot will look like until you see it. Because I made pots by hand for years, I can picture the whole pot before I ask for it, and flesh it out in every detail: a 350 ml stoneware mug, 10 cm tall, with straight 5 mm walls, a rolled rim, a trimmed foot, a three-finger handle, and a matte blue glaze, fired to 1240 °C so it holds hot tea and survives the dishwasher. If you know exactly what pot you’re getting (and can therefore prompt for it), that’s still pottery.
Besides, if Claude shuts down, I still have a job as a potter (making 1 pot in a two-week sprint, but still).