Kevin Scott is a maker. Given that he’s been Microsoft’s CTO for almost a decade, that doesn’t come as a shock. But his passion for making stuff extends to two hobbies—pottery and woodworking—that he pursues in a studio he built in Los Gatos, California. Large and lavishly outfitted, it’s packed with the tools of all his trades: a gas-powered kiln and a full woodshop, but also an office bedecked in computing equipment. On any given day, he may spend 9 or 10 hours there on video calls related to his day job.

Scott’s studio/office sits in a sleepy neighborhood more evocative of Mayberry than Silicon Valley in all its hard-charging glory. (There’s even a barber shop across the street.) When I dropped by recently, he showed me some of his handiwork, along with tech projects such as the infrared radiometer he devised to read carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide emissions from his kiln’s chimney. More to the point of my visit, he was quick to draw parallels between the craftsmanship he pursues on his own time and the massive shift the software industry is currently going through.

“When I was a little kid, there was this debate about your legitimacy as a woodworker if you used power tools instead of exclusively making things with hand tools,” he remembers. “People believed that hand tools were superior and led to a higher-quality product. It was a raging debate.”

By contrast, today’s software engineers are being pragmatic about their own extraordinary new power tool: generative AI.

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