On AI, craft, and building things that matter (1300 words)
Beyond Slop
Visions for humane creative AI tools based on craft, process, and emergence.
The Myth of the Instant Cake Mix
How to think about creative tooling in the new world of generative AI
The AI Aesthetic
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
On Taste, Effort & Curiosity - again
When AI collapses how long it takes to ship, what’s left is judgment, experimentation, and knowing what not to build.
More Than a Tool
What We Learned from a Year of Conversations About AI
Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used
I’m tired of this phrase and this simple way of thinking about tools. This blog post is a wandering train of thought on the topic of what tools are and why it matters to be even slightly more mature in how we think about them.
Why AI is exposing design’s craft crisis
AI didn’t create the craft crisis in design — it exposed the technical literacy gap that’s been eroding strategic influence for over a decade.
The Age of Wonders and Terrors
Twenty years ago, when the idea of AI taking over the world in our lifetimes still struck most of us as the unconstrained fantasy of those who knew too much science fiction and too little science, …
Literature fans should welcome AI as a fellow wordsmith | Aeon Essays
Strong resistance to AI among writers is understandable. But it obscures what we share with the machines: language itself
Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do?
The world is in the grip of ecological, meaning, and language crises that are converging into a metacrisis. Big AI is accelerating them all. LLM engineering sits at the core. Despite the public good motives of language engineers and the promise of LLMs, this work is being leveraged to create unprecedented wealth and power for a handful of individuals and corporations while causing existential harm to life on earth. As a profession, we urgently need to come together to explore alternatives and to design a life-affirming future for our field of natural language processing that is centered on human flourishing on a living planet.
AI is Creating Peak Software, Media is the Best Analogy
Let's learn more about the world's most important manufactured product. Meaningful insight, timely analysis, and an occasional investment idea.
The Omg Lol Times · We have to talk about AI “art”
Note: In this post I’m going to use the term “AI” as a lazy shorthand for “generative content creation via large-scale pre-trained models” because time is tight and I’ve got arthritis. I know it’s not really “AI”, but please, let me give my typing fingers a break here.
Thick practices for AI tools
This essay is the result of thoughts developed during the PIBBSS fellowship this summer. Thanks to Dusan and Maris for feedback on a draft of this essay. Thanks to Sahil and Niki for discussions that influenced the ideas of this essay. 1. Intro What if we could build AI tools...
The Crooked Timber of AI
The philosophical perils of conflating discoveries and inventions, and how to overcome them
Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools
How do the productivity effects of AI evolve across successive generations of tools, and to what extent do task-level gains ultimately translate into final outp
Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools
How do the productivity effects of AI evolve across successive generations of tools, and to what extent do task-level gains ultimately translate into final outp