Lamp Rubbers

There's going to be a new class of people. I'll call them: lamp rubbers: humans who know how to talk to the genie. Everyone else will stare at the lamp, waiting for magic.

The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed. William Gibson said that, and I felt it this weekend when I set up OpenClaw on my Mac Mini. I told it to scrape every event happening in Venice Beach for the next three months, score them for quality, and queue the good ones for me to approve for my Venice Times project. It did that, then built the middleware app I am using to manage everything. Ok that only took 20 minutes… that is faster than I can wrap my head around the problem space AND a brand new solution.

I sat there with an empty text box. I did not know what to ask for yet...I made tea to think about what I wanted next.

And that is the new divide. Who can articulate what they want clearly enough to make the machine useful. Most people can't. They've spent their whole lives capability constrained by bosses, client briefs, technology. Now the constraint isn't capability, it's the terrifying question:

What do you actually want?

Lamp rubbers figure that out. They get comfortable with the blank page. They learn to translate vague ambition into specific direction, one question at a time. They don't need to know how to code or design — they need to know how to think out loud with enough precision that something useful comes back.

This is where products like AI agents suck. You can't let the creativity of your customer determine the value of your product. The tool is only as good as the person rubbing the lamp.

So — how do you become a lamp rubber?

You play. Not hacks. Not prompt engineering courses. You practice the uncomfortable act of sitting with an open-ended tool and no instructions.

John Cleese calls it "open mode." A state of creative play. Curiosity held longer than feels productive. The lamp doesn't reward the smartest person in the room. It rewards the one who's willing to rub it wrong fifty times and keep going.

So if you're staring at that empty text box right now, wondering if you're built for this — you're asking the wrong question. The right question is: what would you build if the only limit was your ability to describe it?

Start rubbin' the lamp!