"Praxis is the idea that you do something cos you want to do it. And after you've done it, you find out all the reasons why you did it." Tony Wilson said that in 1984, sitting in a bathtub in south Manchester, trying to explain Factory Records to anyone listening. It sounds romantic. It sounds like permission to follow your gut and figure it out later. But that's a misreading.

Engineering, at its best, is repeatable, testable, transferable between people because it's written down as a rule. That's exactly what the razor unit's makers had. What they didn't have was design judgement - the thing rooted in observation rather than specification, that knows when the rule has stopped serving the purpose it was built for. They applied technical rationality to a problem that needed reflection instead, and the result was an object with exact tolerances and n

"Systems thinking" has become the kind of phrase people add to their profile the way a small business adds "artisan" to a jar of jam. It's been emptied of meaning by people using it as a shield. So it's worth asking what it would actually mean, precisely, if the word still had edges.

Developing concepts with Claude means understanding how Gen AI works and working with it's limitations. During an exploratory workflow today I ask it several questions as starting points to develop the nucleus of a concept. It came back with systems logic: structure, audience, constraints, examples. I told it the thinking would emerge from exploration instead. The AI pushed back. We went sideways anyway.

Call this the rising floor. Every useful machine absorbs the layer of work it can do better than people. The human contribution does not vanish. It moves upward, into judgement, selection, taste, and ethics, questions a machine cannot answer for you because they are not technical questions at all. That is where AI is heading now, into code, legal drafting, HR policy, marketing copy, the layer of execution that used to define a competent professional.