Can AI create genuinely deep things?

1. 1

   Left to itself, AI makes superficial, crazy stuff insanely fast, but doesn’t produce depth.

2. 2

   Depth is finding a contradiction and making a decision that resolves it. Agents handle the work well after those decisions already exist, and they can take ordinary technical decisions by following patterns. They are weak while the contradiction is still unnamed.

3. 3

   A skill like /grill-me can force some of those decisions out before implementation, but most of what needs defining still shows up after the fact.

4. 4

   Agents outperform humans at being systematic, thorough, and free of laziness and fatigue. That isn’t about taste, and it isn’t about depth.

5. 5

   An agent can surprise you and go somewhere you didn’t think of or forgot to think about. But there’s an element of luck in it, and it isn’t really repeatable.

6. 6

   Experience comes specifically from interaction, from clicking through.

7. 7

   An agent can click through a product, but it doesn’t hurt: no irritation, no fatigue, no wasted time. When something is slow, I get bored, distracted, and fall out of flow.

8. 8

   Agents mostly don’t think about how to fix what hurts in a product, and they are very good at finding workarounds.

9. 9

   Unlike agents, people are bad at workarounds and treat technology as an act of God. That’s where the pain we need comes from.

10. 10

    Maybe what’s needed on top of the pain is the ambition to make it great: something I wouldn’t be ashamed to show to someone.

11. 11

    Taste is not the design tokens. Taste is noticing when the tokens are wrong: when a new color has to be added without breaking the palette, or when two tokens should collapse into one. Same with clicks: cutting a flow from seven clicks to two isn’t automatically better; there are always trade-offs.

12. 12

    If you sit down with an agent and dig in carefully, you can fix problems much faster than before agents. But the trend now is to make a wow video, demo, page or tweet, not to dig deeper.

13. 13

    Maybe we’re trying to make AI reproduce old forms of products, when it could create fundamentally new ones. Will agents replace software you have to click through altogether? Apple’s answer is no: they just made a MacBook with a touchscreen.