How This Newsletter Gets Made
A straightforward answer, for anyone who's curious.
I'm a knife sharpener, not a writer. Everything in this newsletter — what happened in the shop that week, what I think about a tool or technique, the calls I make about steel and geometry — comes from me, or from the other sharpeners here at Steel Revival. When an opinion or observation belongs to one of them instead of me, I call that out in the text rather than writing it as if it were mine. I use AI to help turn all of it into clean, readable sentences, the same way I'd reach for a grinder instead of a hand file: it's a tool that lets us spend our time on the actual work instead of wrestling with prose.
That's the whole process. There's no ghostwriter, no outside editorial team. I'm the one putting each issue together, pulling from what happened at the bench that week — mine and my colleagues' — and using AI to help shape it into something worth sending.
What's Ours, and What Isn't
- Ours: Every observation, opinion, technique, and decision in this newsletter belongs to someone at Steel Revival. If it's attributed to a specific person, that's who actually thinks it. If it's not, it's mine.
- Not ours: The sentence-level polish. None of us are trained writers, and we'd rather put that time into the work than into learning to be one.
Why I Do It This Way
When I started Steel Revival, I wanted a way to talk with people about the work, not just do the work in a quiet shop. Writing well takes time and practice I didn't have, and doing it badly wasn't going to serve anyone. AI closed that gap. It's the reason this newsletter exists at all rather than being an idea I never got around to.
If you ever read something here that doesn't sound like something the credited person would actually think or say, tell me. Getting that right is the part that should never be outsourced, and I want to know if it ever slips.
Questions?
Happy to talk about it. Reach out anytime at info@steelrevivaledgeworks.com.