Comment by doublerabbit

>If I haven't created it myself and yet still have an end product, how have I accomplished anything?

Maybe what you wanted to accomplish wasn't the dimensioning of lumber?

Achievements you can make by using CNC:

    - Learning feeds+speeds
    - Learning your CNC tooling.
    - Learning CAD+CAM.
    - Design of the result.
    - Maybe you are making tens of something.  Am I really achieving that much by making ~100 24"x4" pieces of plywood?
    - Maybe you want to design something that many people can manufacture.

I take satisfaction living in a house I did not build using tools I could not use or even enumerate, tools likewise acting on materials I can neither work with nor name precisely enough to be unambiguous, in a community I played no part in before moving here, kept safe by laws I can't even read because I've not yet reached that level of mastery of my second tongue.

It has a garden.

I've been coding essentially since I learned to read, I have designed boolean logic circuits from first principles to perform addition and multiplication, I know enouhg of the basics of CPU behaviours such that if you gave me time I might get as far as a buggy equivalent of a 4004 or something, and yet everything from there to C is a bunch of here-be-dragons and half-remembered uni modules from 20 years ago, then some more exothermic flying lizards about the specifics of "modern" (relative to 2003) OSes, then apps which I actually got paid to make.

LLMs lets everything you don't already know be as fun as learning new stuff in uni or as buying new computers from a store, whichever you ask it for.