I have never used AE before Agrarian Skies. I find its base precept somewhat cheesy.
However, I am attempting to embrace it for AS, and the first thing I built with my fledgling ME network as an ME assembly multiblock, and plugged in recipes for all the AE things as they have the most complicated built trees.
I can see that I will (quickly) need to get some furnaces hooked up to do smelting tasks for the network, but my principal problem is with one of the first AE recipes: To cut basic and advanced processor assemblies you need to use a quartz cutting tool on the crafting grid with the other reagents, and it looses a point of durability per craft: I made the recipe using a fully repaired tool, but each time it crafts the assembler makes another etching tool, so I have a collection of 49/50 knives building up.
How does one use AE to automate the assembly of items that use an item that takes a durability hit on each craft?