We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes | Hacker News Reader

We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

mass-driver.com

111 pointstony_cannistra113 comments

Hey, I’m the author of this article. Just thought I’d share some context, since HN is a little outside the intended audience:

- We’re a tiny design studio specialising in fonts, so our website was (maybe predictably) not set up to handle a big traffic spike. It should be stable now.

- This article was written in response to some font industry discussions on the same topic. It’s a collection of thoughts rather than a manifesto, and there’s nuance which it doesn’t go into. I’m not a die-hard AI hater, just opposed to careless use of it within this narrow field.

Appreciate the more reasonable comments!

Thanks for writing it, I enjoyed the perspective. I found it by way of Michael Sacasas' post: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/feeding-on-illusi...

For font design, and art beyond what could be called boilerplate art, real art, not just something to quickly throw on a website so you have something there, AI is not a good tool.

I think AI will take over many jobs, firstly in the arrangement of characters and words into stock text, or coding. But art, not just pictures, is something that will take longer and may never happen. Design is very similar.

Good art makes you feel something, and you need the human experience to feel that before you can make that and make other people feel that.

AI is going to replace artists in exact the same way rhythm machines replaced drummers.

If the rhythm machines were making the beats, your analogy would be sound. Unfortunately, they do not.

AI has already started earning good money in music. The Velvet Sundown, for example was getting a million listens a month on Spotify.

People still make clothes by hand but try finding one at your local shopping centre.

I'm the op on this one (not the author). Gotta say, I had higher hopes for the community here.

Isn't it worthwhile to examine our patterns of thinking and work? Shouldn't alternative perspectives such as these spark conversation, rather than sly jibes?

HN grew from curiosity and good-faith. Y'all are not showing up.

I recently mentioned that my team and most of my dev friends don’t use AI for code on a gamdev forum (we do stuff like distributed consensus, compilers, etc.). I was quickly denounced as “an arrogant douche”.

I think the eye roll is the need to shout that you don’t use AI.

It’s the new web dev, imo.

This post wasn’t about sparking conversation. It’s about using AI makes me lose the human touch in what I do, blah blah, heard it all before.

Sorry, not sorry.

TFA raises several points I hadn't heard before. Here's one.

The artifacts we produce define our culture. If we allow LLMs to produce our work, our culture represents that which they understand. But LLMs can't be trained on the entirety of the human experience. "How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are underrepresented in the training data?"

I just feel like that's not performative in the way you're insinuating. That feels like a take to me. Respectful engagement is what I expected here.

But that's not anything new, and even in the same text you can see examples of that.

LLMs are a tool. The brush is a tool, the pencil is a tool. The way we write already is defined by tools. This very comment is remarkably defined by its medium, I can't control its font size! Or the font at all, for that matter, nor the color, hell I can't even control how and where this comment is read! This means I'm generally going to write it in English, a whole different language from my native one! How is that for "defining"???

None of this is new, it's all dictated by human experience in the very same way that the output of a LLM gets dictated by human experience. That's the way memes (as in, anthropology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme?) work.

LLMs don't understand, they just output based on some parameters. We've been here before.

The LLM is the next generation of 20th century culture. Until the early 20th century, all stories (from before homer to Shakespeare, through Dickens and so on), music etc we continual remix and interpretation. But as recording became possible and then film, cultural elements mixed with law adopted expensive production and started to become more locked down. Corporations (which are just machines themselves) made musical acts whose members were just actors playing a role (still happens today with K-pop being the most successful). Disney colonized the public domain and drowned out the origins, with their versions becoming canonical

But consumers were willing participants. Rather than make a costume of your favorite character people now preferentially seek out licensed versions of dolls, costumes, “official” soundtracks etc rather than treating it all as just more raw material for your own imagination.

I’m not saying there isn’t fanfic and remix culture as well but when was the last time you saw a kid with a home-made “character” T-shirt? They even buy sport jerseys with the ads included!

So the mechanical slop infiltrating culture is just the current apotheosis of this process atrophy of the imagination. Truly it is degenerative AI

It is one of the biggest things to ever happen in the history of software, art, and writing. We're nowhere near the "it's meaningless to talk about why you don't like it" threshold.

>We're nowhere near the "it's meaningless to talk about why you don't like it" threshold.

We crossed that threshold at least a year ago.

we're so near and literally beyond that threshold

Speaking personally I was not particularly moved by the article because I have seen the same thing, in different shapes, thousands of times on HN and elsewhere. Really, AI can't feel and therefore it is inferior? Never heard that one before. Really, an AI can't feel friction and therefore can't adapt to it? Daring today, aren't we? (And a more interesting question: is that even true..?) I realize I am being unnecessarily harsh here, but this article is very much preaching to the choir on HN, which has an anti-AI bent. No one is showing up because there's nothing really to show up to here -- and that is why you are left with "sly jibes" and not much else.

Look, really not trying to get into the weeds here, but since we're there: I respect your take that nothing in this article is novel, though I disagree with it.

My point wasn't as much about that as it was the lack of good faith engagement and curiosity.

Not interesting? Let the damn thing die on /new.

The article does not engage with its subject matter with good-faith engagement and curiosity. "Always has been. Always will be." is, inherently, the author's lack of engagement with the subject matter. "They cannot see the world outside" is a shut door that does not admit curiosity or an interesting comment. And so you are seeing this reflected back in the response.

There has been plenty of good faith ruined by trolls on both sides of the discussion. The vast majority of which are new accounts. HN seems to have been under attack for years now.

More generally, the AI discussions that HN regulars actually want to have are going to be limited to the business plans, press releases about new models, and the (very) occasional higher quality project that couldn't have been done without a big lift from an LLM.

Anyone genuinely wanting to discuss the truth from a philosophical or scientific perspective is never going to penetrate the profound ignorance on much of the business side (mostly startups and aging leadership), so why bother? Business is at least what everyone has in common here.

It’s bizarre to me to hear that HN has an anti-AI bent.

This is the place I see AI discussed the most. Admittedly the opinions here are mixed. A lot of people do have negative feelings but there are also a ton of pro-AI comments. There Are huge 600 comment threads about a new model release, weird rants about “Gastown”, constant “Launch HNs” for model wrappers, and people saying writing code by hand is archaic.

This is one of the most pro-AI places I spend time. The other websites I frequent are much more anti-AI and my experience in real life is that most people don’t like what AI is doing to the world (even if they grudgingly find it useful at work.)

Do you really think threads like [1], [2], [3] are pro-AI? I literally just selected three at random from today's feed. I think the only positive threads about AI here are typically new model releases.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48923079 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921461 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48926590

The last one isn’t negative because of AI but because of grok/elon.

Sure and OpenAI articles aren’t negative because of Sam Altman, Anthropic articles aren’t negative because of Dario etc…

They could be. But you’re delusional if you think people don’t shit on grok because of the association to Elon. Or it’s just a shitty model, who knows.

Five of the top eleven posts right now are about AI:

1. Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model [https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/]

2. High-Bandwidth Flash offers efficient storage for model weights [https://spectrum.ieee.org/high-bandwidth-flash]

3. Grok Build is open source [https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build]

4. Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf] [https://www.siegelendowment.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/f...]

5. An Interactive Map of AI [https://artifipedia.com/map]

I would only say the discussion on #3 is particularly negative and as others mentioned Grok has a lot of its own baggage: Elon Musk, recently uploading home directories without asking, making sexual imagery of minors, etc. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/22/grok-ai-g...)

---

So a little less than half of the top 10 stories are about AI and only 1 is negative but that one potentially has other factors at play.

Contrast this to how the general public feels about AI:

"A majority of registered voters, 57%, said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits, compared with 34% who said the opposite. What’s more, a plurality of voters view AI negatively ... Just 26% of voters say they have positive feelings about AI, compared with 46% who hold negative views. In fact, the only topics with a lower net positive rating than AI in the NBC News survey were the Democratic Party and Iran."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-majority...

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Given all that, I would say HN has a more pro-AI bias than the general population. Do you disagree?

I don't like what AI is doing to the world and the tools it puts into the hands of those who would make the world a worse place, but I don't have my head in the sand about the inevitability of what is about to happen in a lot of fields, for better or worse.

Companies will see it as a way to make more for less, they will lay off many people, not realising, as Henry Ford did, that to make money you need to pay your workers, so they can buy products.

What the end state will be is very unclear right now, could be bladerunner, could be star trek, could be 1984. Could be terminator.

We will just have to wait and see.

> could be bladerunner, could be star trek, could be 1984. Could be terminator.

It's a profound moment for sure, but let's ask ourselves: could the creative works of early last century have predicted our world? Would people in the 1930s say "2030, it could be like Metropolis, could be like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, could be like Flash Gordon"? No.

The real future might be nothing like any of the sci-fi movies we're so used to representing potential AI-based futures.

One thing I've been trying to remind myself about is that humans have explored only a very narrow slice of possibilities within the known universe. AI's ability to crawl the search space is going to uncover way more slices, (which yes, could lead to various outcomes like the movies listed), but more likely to be some hybrid/blend of outcomes (or entirely new outcomes) that we haven't imagined yet at all.

"May you live in interesting times" and all that

Those shows are just shorthand for 'utopian future with no need for money', 'distopian future where corporations have control', 'distopian future where machines have control', 'distopian future where the government have control' etc

Plainly, the precise future we get will be as unlike the films as our current situation is like Metropolis (robot girlfriends, skyscrapers, drones/flying transport) but the specifics are very much different.

We certainly do live in interesting times. Would be nice for them to get a bit less interesting IMO.

> It’s bizarre to me to hear that HN has an anti-AI bent.

IMHO, it's a solid 50:50. The threads about new models and whatnot will be filled by hypers, the threads detailing the social and economic consequences (or the newest scandal of major protagonists) with doomers and haters.

Yeah that seems about right to me.

And that seems fairly balanced. Especially considering polling says more people are worried about AI than excited in the general population

> HN, which has an anti-AI bent

In what world are you living? 90% of the front page is AI.

it's funny when a site posted on a tech board goes down from traffic. it's funnier when the site is making some kind of principled stance about the power of handmade tools, which presumably made the site, which went down.

Please don't write in this petty way on HN.

Everyone knows that AI would never build a tool that would cap bandwidth based on how much a user is paying for hosting. Famously anthropic charges you the same amount for claude usage regardless of how many tokens you use, extending towards infinity.

I imagine everyone has a point at which they feel a movement has pushed its rhetoric just that bit too far. When one takes a lofty and high-minded position, one can find oneself exposed to ridicule.

In case it helps the authentic human connection: I too wrote this with my human hands and did not use AI.

The hacker intelligentsia is long gone from this site. It’s little more than a VC/tech merc mixer.

When you write without AI you cultivate your team’s understanding which cultivates communication and teamwork and immediate understanding during downtime and emergencies. Build your team, not the product

  <a>Info<span class="hide_on_mobile">rmation</span></a>

Clever. Not sure what the <a> is for, though.

I fed your comment into ChatGPT and asked it to answer your question. It told me that <a> starts an html anchor.

Which while absolutely correct does not at all address your question.

It calls a click handler that pushes a new route that closes the sub info panel the click handler was trying to open in the first place obviously

Pretty sure the alif/alif had upward prongs because it was the head of the ox (so the triangle is the snout or head with two prongs above. Phoenician alif has the upward prongs. It may have come from Egyptian which would have been a definite ox head.

The Greek/Latin A is the symbol inverted — those are not legs.

Where are the voices of reason?

My wife got an email from a new hire (now even a new hire yet: she's still on a trial basis), a 23 years old, where she explains that she doesn't want to use AI. That she doesn't like what AI does. On a funny sidenote: the email is obviously 99% llmish, which is hilarious.

That's one extremity: crazy people who refuse to learn a new tool.

Then on the other extremity you have the even much crazier ones: those who believe they've got an intelligent machine that is going to solve all their work problems during the day and then, at night, that is going to enlighten them by revealing them who god really is.

Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?

> Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?

They're unlikely to be vocal because they've already evaluated and decided the role AI will play in their work/life and just moved on/kept working. That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI (either by force or choice).

> That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI

Perhaps small now. But overall this seems to be what most have done in my small social circle. Small uses of AI here and there, sometimes surprising gains/wins they find out and share if asked, otherwise really it's just another tool to learn and make use of.

Most everyone thinks it's overhyped and wedged into stupid places it doesn't make much sense, especially in consumer products. But they also can recognize that behind the scenes and in closed doors there are perhaps some exciting things happening in certain industries and use-cases.

Most are still very much in the "haven't played with it much yet, it's moving too fast and I'm too old and busy with my life" or "still evaluating as time allows" stage. This is mid-career folks in various professional roles, skewing towards tech. Some sense of "this tech is getting good fast, and I will be left behind if I do not learn it at some point in the future".

I will say most have barely ventured past the "copy/paste from ChatGPT" stage of AI use. It usually elicits comment when someone moves past that and finds out they are far more capable than they realized. Then usually some more comments a couple weeks later mentioning newfound limitations.

I count quite a few of my colleagues into this observing and must learn role. My problem is that most entry use cases that are advertised are not cutting it for me. Write overlong emails that could have been a short hand written one? Write longer prompts to get shorter LLM email responses? Create presentations that screw up the corporate theme and send me fixing it? Write power automate flows that send me chasing errors? Particularly management and leadership positions are urged to engage with LLM tools but are drowning in the noise of busy days and flood of communication. Summarising emails that then misses the crucial information is not saving any time.

> Summarising emails that then misses the crucial information is not saving any time.

Ironically due to an overloaded inbox these days, I've been using a LLM as the world's most inefficient e-mail filter.

It does a decent job at this, and gives at least a nice starting point in the morning for a prioritized hitlist to power through. Gets most things pretty accurate, but I only use it to sense "importance" and not much else.

Certainly not life changing, just a nice to have.

I've had far more real gains with home IT projects. Tons of home automation integrations and "silly" projects I've been wanting to get done for a decade but never really had the energy to want to deal with. These sorts of things also allowed me some time/excuse to play around with agents to see what the fuss was about.

I now have the world's most complex garden irrigation/sensor setup complete with automated watering and grafana panels! I could have tied everything from the hardware through software together myself, but I just was not interested in installing the 856th Ubuntu VM in my life, configuring InfluxDB from scratch, etc.

I can see the future potential due to the above, but I also see how it went off the rails easily and also produced some laughably inefficient/unmaintable stuff like Flux queries which toss what should be variables as statics directly into the grafana panels, etc. Add a single new sensor to a group and you'll be re-writing the panel queries. Just horrible ground level design only maintainable via brute force. But when you just tell it to add the thing and it does... I can see why many feel it's a superpower.

For personal use I find "AI" extremely useful and fun.

I asked Claude to create a mini stack that email me a daily digest:

Today's weather, rain forecast. Top ten local news,US news, world news New HN articles, bubble up articles about bicycles, crafts, Japan, exclude Rust, Zig, Python, JS, Node, Bun. Summary of articles in my favorite subreddits.

A separate email summarizing new antique items on ShopGoodWill.com, with their starting prices, auction end dates.

Oh, and it configured Proxmox on my NUC and installed and configured the whole *arr stack.

Now, I am a techie, so I know what to tell it and could do all of the above myself with enough elbow grease, but I never would have. All of the above took under an hour.

Just this morning, I created a plugin so that Claude speaks to me as Samuel L. Jackson, or Arnold, etc. Fun fun.

Replaced 90% of my browser web searches. I don't know how many trees I burned and lakes dried.

We're right here! Some of us just prefer to stay out of these silly irrational debates because we know that neither of those two crazy camps will listen to a word we, or anyone else, will say. We might be wrong about that (I hope we're wrong about that!) but there sure are enough other people chattering that it's easy to sit back and let them have it out.

The "you'll get left behind" crowd has already made it clear that they're not worth engaging with, you're not going to find reasonable voices anywhere those threads are happening...

You might not be hearing from these people.

I use LLMs daily to piece together technical reports and smooth out rough drafts. It saves me hours of time / week.

I also use it to augment my technical work, because I don't want to be out of a job one day with no marketable skills, except driving an agent harness.

There is a percentage of the population that thinks LLMs are actually intelligent and truly can't tell the difference.

I think others just want to live life as a passenger, not think, and have AI do all the work.

>others just want to live life as a passenger, not think, and have AI do all the work.

Fuck, doesn't everyone? The future we were promised is one where machines did all the work leaving humans free to pursue a richer existence, whether that's creative pastimes or just laying on a beach.

Instead of democratizing the future, essentially every technological advance since the printing press has served only to increase the concentration of wealth and power at the top.

I can't imagine actually wanting to work if you didn't have to.

Lots of people enjoy doing things - no need to treat them like assholes just for that. The sci-fi version of AI frees people up - the real version sometimes (mostly?) takes away enjoyable work and reduces people's ability to make a life for their family without being miserable (which is the fault of the practical reality of our society - not inherently AI's fault).

>no need to treat them like assholes just for that.

Hmm, I wasn't trying to imply anyone is an asshole for enjoying things. Is that how it came off?

Everywhere, presumably, not vocal, doing other things.

We're here -- I use AI for low-complexity toil, one-off scripts, search & discovery, and as a sounding board for new perspectives.

I still design and build systems almost all myself. If a snippet comes out of an LLM I'm keen to use it's filtered through my brain as well. Polished and transformed to align with my vision. After all, I'm on the hook for supporting it and bringing it to my team.

I'm sure most of us are just sick of the mania around this and choose to avoid interacting with content relating to it.

It's very useful. But irresponsible to use without recognizing and respecting its limitations.

I have > 10yoe, fwiw.

We're everywhere. It's extremely easy to trick yourself into thinking that somebody lamenting AI doesn't use AI. AI is an enormous category.

> a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?

I can tell you that while I use AI, it's basically a compressed version of stackoverflow to me. I don't bother with agents because I simply don't have that much code to write. The nature of code didn't change. Less code is better code, and it's a strong smell when people claim that they needed an agent to save time.

When I do have a new project, there's an extremely high chance that I can reuse existing code from another project that already has passing tests, or I am experienced enough to know what exactly needs to be done. I can probably finish my part within the sprint or faster. The agent can only introduce risk to the project timeline or code quality.

This isn't me being arrogant or "anti-AI". The hard part of software development has always been collecting consistent requirements from various stakeholders. I'm pro-AI in the sense that, when used correctly, it helps junior devs learn and otherwise shines a spotlight where the real bottlenecks are (project management and delays).

No AI needed for the design and build of custom metal either, and with a similar long human effort that I am privilaged to be aware and part of that I am quite certain cant be handled useing any computational averaging. Funnily enough, I have had and am right now involved in a project that the customer tried to have AI design, but that the most basic calculations were wrong. It's worse, as even humans working with highly developed design and estimating software, cant deliver accurate shop plans for real world projects that involve irregular surfaces or curves, and changing slopes that must be measured on site. AI will help you enjoy your cubes and parallograms, and cover them with realistic textures.

The site was back up but now it's down again for some reason.

Should have one shotted an assembly rewrite for maximum serving efficiency

to the people claiming "hugged to death", this website works for me while on a train in rural Germany (anyone who lives in Europe should be all too aware about phone network quality here).

As for the content: fully agree. Human touch is a value in itself. Unfortunately, modern capitalism does not provide incentives to take care about value, because (by capitalism's metrics) value is inefficiency.

FYI just 502'd

Is this a flex now?

As always, I don't really care what tools a creative uses to manifest their idea in the world, I care how good the product is.

AI, just like the coding language you choose is a TOOL. Tools can be wielded expertly or crudely. At the end of the day your customer doesn't care who you are they care about your product.

This doesn't really make sense except as a reflexive reaction to the article title. "It's just a tool" is much less meaningful at this point than something like what the author has written. Everything we use or reference or leverage is a tool - that doesn't mean anything.

hugged to death at 8 points and 20 minutes in frontpage.

Please use AI (or anything) to fix your site.

Well, they're using Render which you'd think they'd be able to handle HN traffic. Not a good look for Render as a service, especially when their first item under product is autoscaling.

Edge caching seems to be opt-in

Sorry for the disruption! This is 100x our normal peak traffic, needed to raise the instance limit.

It's the natural vinyl warmth

I'll be honest, I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a human-only created typeface and an AI assisted typeface.

That's a fair point, and in full self-criticism mode: I suspect I also would not be able to.

What it tells me is not that their work has no value, only that I am not the target audience for their work.

Artists: No cold-hearted machine can ever replicate the ingenuity, the innate creativity and passionate soul of the artiste.

Later: The villain cat has the catchphrases 'Purrrfect' and 'You must be kitten me'. The snake character makes lotsss of sss noissesss.

This (and all the disgusting "hugged to death, you're dumb, use AI" comments that have replaced HN's normal venom-less "hugged to death" comments) makes me want to leave Hacker News.

It’s a mixed bag. You have insufferable mouth breathing morons who think AGI is here, and on the other hand you have rational - dare I say enlightened - individuals such as yourself.

If it is that bad then I sincerely apologise.

Why wouldn't a snake character make lots of ssss noises? I've never met one in real life but I have to imagine the tongue is an impediment.

And yet people still prefer it over AI slop.

I shall call it artist slop.

Why would anybody hate a harmless human skill, like art, or carpentry? Why act like this ever, in any situation? This attitude has nothing to do with pro-AI or anti-AI. It's just pointless, horrible bitterness.

How did hate come in - did you assume it?

Your generalizations are less creative than the output of an LLM from 4 years ago.

Grandiose enough for internal documentation and self-motivation but otherwise uninteresting. It's Yet Another Meaning And History Post of the variety you've seen posted a few dozen times. Has the flavour of someone still discussing tabs and spaces. In an odd irony, it's mostly like the content it disparages.

All these "principled" people telling others that they "practice what they preach" then keep shooting themselves in the foot with their "production" site down and hugged to death on the front page.

Just ask the AI to set up your site for better uptime if you don't know how to.

You say this as if almost every AI generated landing page posted to HN isn't falling apart at the seams.

Sorry but that is just rage posting. Please turn up your brain and have a look at github uptimes for instance. You would think that by now AI would have solved all their problems right?

What sort of human hands make computer fonts? Are you there coding in the ones and zeros on some sort of breadboard, wiring up the data using an oscilloscope and rare earth magnets?

There seems to be this idea that using AI is the same thing as walking away and not touching it. Like that you would just say to the computer, do the thing and then not look at it, read it or edit it in any way. What's the world where you're describing where you wouldn't select and edit and refine? You know, with software as an example, how that works with AI is that you spend all day opting it and refining it and you do it over and over and over and you're guiding it and you're shaping it. So it's not like the computer does it. You're still there. I mean, you're making a typeface. You're not chiseling something into stone. You're making a program of sorts that will make shapes. And I don't know why there would be any world where you would just walk away from your first prompt and call it done.

To answer your first question: almost all good fonts start with sketches on paper. Every tool has a kind of grain, a sort of ‘shape language’ it pushes you towards making, and the bézier curves fonts use internally are surprisingly opinionated.

The first few months of any new typeface involve switching between physical and digital drawings frequently, trying to make sure no single tool has too much influence over the shape.

AI might be just another tool, but its grain is super unpredictable. Refining AI-generated sketches is more complicated, and ultimately the skills it requires can only be developed through firsthand practice of analogue techniques. I literally studied stonecarving (along with calligraphy, brush lettering, etc.) in order to be able to make better digital fonts.

My point, and maybe it's overly simplistic, is that at some point you are using the computer to make computer fonts. At some point the ideas go into the computer and you are using computer tools to build the font. They start in the shower or from the finger feel of carving stones whatever, but before and after AI computer fonts are built with computer software tools. Carving rocks, sure, human hands.

The idea that AI is different, in kind, than any of the many other tools that you use is silly to me -- at no point is it desirable for you to throw out your brain. As you say, every tool has a different sort of "grain", which is neither good nor bad but does in fact influence the final product.

Where you lose me is why would you implicitly throw out your process? What about this tool gives the idea that you should not keep the parts of the process that is valuable, on paper etc? AI probably would do better fiddling with the beziers or whatever, what would be the reason that it's ipso facto a bad idea? Who is saying that?

I'm not sure basically what the other side of your argument was supposed to be.

It’s not about throwing out the process, it’s about making sure the end product is the result of intentional decisions rather than just going with the flow of whatever tool is being used. The grain isn’t intrinsically bad, but in a performant typeface you’re going to be reading for hours at a time, over-reliance on a single tool will noticeably harm the readability.

By switching between digital and analogue drawing tools, you’re translating the work between different media, and the act of translation is what smooths over the bumps of any single tool.

AI might eventually become good at fiddling with the béziers, but doing that part manually is an essential part of the process. If you don’t fully understand how the béziers naturally behave (and when to lean into or push back against that, for both aesthetic and technical reasons), the end result will be meaningfully worse.

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