My friend built his so it can still be run manually. I think he just mounted the handwheels on the other end but I'm not sure what he did about the Y axis.
CNC isn't just for one-offs. It's great for complex shapes and arcs that can't be done by hand and for tedious repetitive stuff (within a single part).
I basically did handcoded cnc for a few years professionally. At first you might be very slow but after a while it gets pretty easy. It really helps if your machine can handle variables, loops, subroutines and complex math like most modern programming languages.
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