The line that the tightest bottleneck is the brain behind the pen, not the pen, changes what LLMs do for me. If a model writes the program, the bottleneck becomes knowing what you want. That is where one-person software looks different from a universal tool: a small program built around one person's data only has to be right for that person. Do you count that as a machine tool in your sense, or does narrow scope strengthen your no-universal-tool point?
There's certainly a long lineage of Domain Specific Languages, which are arguably another type of machine tool, another way to explore program space. More custom tools can let you find things even further from what others are easily able to build, off in your own unique direction.
The line that the tightest bottleneck is the brain behind the pen, not the pen, changes what LLMs do for me. If a model writes the program, the bottleneck becomes knowing what you want. That is where one-person software looks different from a universal tool: a small program built around one person's data only has to be right for that person. Do you count that as a machine tool in your sense, or does narrow scope strengthen your no-universal-tool point?
There's certainly a long lineage of Domain Specific Languages, which are arguably another type of machine tool, another way to explore program space. More custom tools can let you find things even further from what others are easily able to build, off in your own unique direction.