People. Process. Product.

I've been building complex stuff with AI lately. Things that would have taken weeks are taking minutes. You look at what you just made and think, _yeah, that's pretty good. Look at all that!_

It's a trap.

You're moving fast. You're riding this wave of productivity that feels incredible. And it is incredible. But there's this pervasive feeling of _good enough…_ Look at how much we did! Look at how fast we did it!

But good enough is only good enough.

I've said it for years: the last 20% is the last 80%. That was true before AI. The first 80% arrives so fast that you haven't even warmed up yet to your own idea. Your brain is already moving on to the next thing. But the details, edge cases, the copy, the _feel_ of the thing — that still takes time. Maybe two or three times longer than your first shot.

Speed is a gift, but be sure it doesn't make you lazy.

A tree fell down in Venice, Italy, and everyone misses the shade. So we're planting a new one. But a young tree is not nearly as cool as a mature tree.

The idea: a 3D-printed hexagonal frame that wraps the trunk and stacks into a canopy. Real plants drape down from it — shade, movement, sound. As the tree grows, you add segments at the base to raise the entire structure, keeping the canopy above the growing tree. The structure adapts to the biology.

And the best part, it's designed to disappear. When the tree matures, you pull the frame off.

If you hand me something and say "here's what the robot gave me," you've already told me everything I need to know. Not about the robot, but about you.

It's a tool. If you're hammering something into a wall and break a vase, you don't tell your wife "the hammer broke it." You say "I broke it." That ownership is the difference between using a tool and hiding behind one.

You used AI to draft a strategy deck? Great. But the moment you present it, it's yours.

Own the thinking. Own the outcome.

There's a moment in the first season of Westworld where a host (robot) is fitting a customer (human) in cowboy gear and starts coming on to him, sexually. He hesitates. She's a robot. She says: "If you can't tell, does it matter?"

I think about that line constantly now. We're deep into the era where AI is augmenting everything. If the experience was good; the email clear, and the plan sound — does it matter what made it? Nobody asks what brand of chisel carved the sculpture. The tool has never been the point. Humans don't just consume outputs. We consume stories about how things were made. That story is, a big, part of the product. It's why we pay more for products with good stories.

The AI-made thing doesn't have that story (yet). Its origin story is: a most likely white male drank coffee and typed a prompt. So what happens next? You already know…Capitalism fabricates origin stories.

We do it with food: "farm to table", "artisanal" bread from a factory with a rustic font. AI provenance (thanks Patrick for adding this to my lexicon) fraud is next.

We've been fine with fake origin stories for generations. The "family recipe" that came off a box. The "heritage brand" founded in 2019. The "handmade" label on something from an assembly line. We buy it anyway.

But when a robot does it? Suddenly we are outraged! Which is weird because the human version of this lie has been running for centuries.

Here's where the Westworld metaphor breaks in an interesting way. In the show, the robots eventually develop real deep stories… suffering, memory, consciousness. What happens when the AI's origin story becomes more compelling than the prompter's?

If you can't tell, does it matter?

When everyone runs their work through the same model, the output converges. Everything starts to sound the same.

I don't shop at Walmart. I'm a designer in Venice, California, and I have a certain curated vibe. Walmart is the antithesis of that. So why would I use the Walmart of AI to do my creative thinking?

The market is wide open for the boutique. Not a better general model — a model tuned to a specific sensibility, domain, and taste. One that generates work that sounds like it came from someone who has an opinion.

Picture this: you're in a meeting, your team needs creative direction. Instead of pulling up ChatGPT and getting the same output your competitor got ten minutes ago, you pull in a model trained on twenty years of Thought Merchants' work. Our taste. Our instinct. That's not AI — it's a creative partner with a point of view.

Commoditization always creates a premium tier. You can buy a $12 bottle of wine at Costco or a $1,200 bottle from a vineyard in Napa. Both are wine. They are not the same thing.

AI is heading the same direction. The commodity layer gets cheaper and more universal…the more universal it gets, the more sameness it produces. The more sameness there is, the more valuable differentiation becomes.

I don't shop at Walmart because I have style. Your brand shouldn't either.

You can do almost anything right now. That's the problem.

The capability ceiling has been removed. The bottleneck was never capability. It's attention.

The same discipline problems I had doing manual work are showing up with AI. When I sit down with the robot and I don't know exactly what I'm building, I scatter.

Sound familiar? It should, because it's the exact same muscle that atrophies every time you open Instagram.

Social media is attention poison. But the real damage isn't the wasted hour. It's the habit. You're training yourself to scroll and never go deep…

Then you sit down with the most powerful tool ever built and wonder why you can't focus long enough to do something meaningful.

AI doesn't fix a lack of direction. It multiplies it.