Most traditional construction was done with green wood, in fact, and there is a whole bunch of furniture making and other fine work that can be done with green

Most traditional construction was done with green wood, in fact, and there is a whole bunch of furniture making and other fine work that can be done with green wood. Much carving and turning is preferable on green wood, as it works more easily than dry. And in fact, testing is one of the most widely shared pieces of advice among woodworkers I have seen working and met. If there is more than one of any cut to be made, it is customary to build a custom jig to hold the work, then test on scrap to ensure all is correct. After work pieces are all in or near their final shape, it is typical to do a dry fit: put the entire (or some substantial subassembly of the) finished product together without glue or fasteners to ensure it does fit. Iteration and small tests which allow for fast failure and early correction are a longstanding tradition in woodworking, much longer than in programming. In my personal experience, working professionally as a programmer and as a hobbyist in woodwork, I have been much more impressed by the degree to which woodworkers build their own tools to support their workflows than by programmers. This holds up among individuals I know personally, discussions I have followed online, and popular personalities I have been exposed to. If you follow discussions and developments in both communities, it becomes clear that the difference is not the ease with which one can build tools to make their work better, but the price at which programmers can get professional-grade tools for the same purpose. BSD and Linux are free. Hyper-powered text editors are free. Most programming languages are free. Postgres (and a plethora of other, databases) is free. Compilers, debuggers, package management, CI/cd tools, collaboration tools are all available for free. As for the availability of raw materials for building such tools to improve work, that is a question of cost, not ease. It is certainly easy to build tools for a woodworker, and the cost is not prohibitive, based on the observation that every woodshop I have seen has a significant amount of tools and fixtures built by the worker.