Something I’m noticing about AI, or at least this moment of AI agents and tools for building software, is the extreme amount of fiddling they invite. Fiddling here includes things like trying new models and tools, tweaking prompts, leveraging MCP servers vs. code tools, browsing plugins, installing skills, configuring hooks, setting up subagents, and the list goes on.

The specific knobs you can fiddle vary from tool to tool, but their existence and multitude are hard to avoid. And knobs aren’t even quite the right metaphor here, as turning a knob in the real world tends to have a deterministic effect.

Fiddling with AI can feel like turning knobs on a synthesizer that interprets your choices as suggestions rather than commands.

Take this article by Shrivu Shankar about how they make use of the litany of Claude Code’s features. There’s a lot of helpful stuff in here to be sure, but my biggest takeaway is the sense that the configuration surface is so large, the knobs to turn so numerous, and the interplay between those knobs so mysterious that I could spend an eternity optimizing my setup without ever knowing if the result was meaningfully better or worse.

Then you add on the fact that large language models and the tooling build on top of them is changing rapidly. How is a person who wants to effectively use the best available tools expected to possibly keep up?

Frank Chimero’s recent essay Beyond the Machine reframes this whole dynamic by casting AI as an instrument instead of a tool—something that is not just used but played.

In other words, instruments can surprise you with what they offer, but they are not automatic. In the end, they require a touch. You use a tool, but you play an instrument. It’s a more expansive way of doing, and the doing of it all is important, because that’s where you develop the instincts for excellence. There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.

Instruments also invite fiddling. There are many aspiring musicians who struggle to move beyond endless tweaking, tuning, collecting, or customizing to actually make a tune.

Yet successful musicians fiddle too—maybe even more. Perhaps the trick is knowing when to fiddle and when to play, and recognizing that sometimes those are one and the same.