Dan Batten

convergence to the mean when everyone looks at everyone else to decide what to make, we eventually stop making anything of our own. we copy what works. borrow the language, the aesthetic, the features. we call it learning from the market, following best practices, staying competitive. together, everything starts to feel familiar. polished, interchangeable. nothing wrong. nothing alive. the mean isn’t necessarily bad. it’s where everything lands when we remove the reasons for it to be different. numbers are easier to compare than feelings, so we make things that produce numbers. we study what gets attention, then shape ourselves around it. eventually the feedback stops informing the work and starts authoring it. we’re no longer asking what we want to say. we’re asking what will be rewarded for saying. ai makes this loop frictionless. it can draw from more references than we could see in a lifetime. but access to every perspective isn’t the same as having one. it hasn’t lived a particular life that makes one detail unbearable and another beautiful. when we ask it to choose for us without bringing any intention of our own, we get something plausible, easy to approve. then we ship it, measure it, copy it, and feed it back into the next round. a tidal wave of mid. this changes not just the work, but the people making it. we describe ourselves in categories platforms can distribute and markets understand. designer. founder. creator. pick a niche. build a brand. be consistent. the parts that don’t fit become inconvenient, even when those contradictions might produce our most interesting work. we become easier to classify and harder to tell apart. i think we need to approach making things more like artists. an artist develops a perspective through the work. making, noticing, choosing, failing, returning. learning what matters even when nobody else cares. craft gives that perspective a form precise enough for someone else to experience. the life outside the work matters too. the places you’ve lived, the people you’ve loved, the things you’re embarrassed to care about. these aren’t distractions from having something to say. they’re how you come to have something to say. we understand this with music, paintings, photographs, movies. we expect a person to be present in the choices. we want to experience something we wouldn’t have encountered without them. software can do this too. a piece of software expresses beliefs about how life should feel. what deserves your attention. what you should be free to change. whether a task should feel like paperwork or play. even a small interaction can carry someone’s care, humor, or curiosity. but we rarely talk about software as a medium. we talk about it as an industry. markets to capture, workflows to optimize, competitors to catch up with. we add a feature because someone else has it, without asking whether it belongs. products accumulate the same parts and lose what made them worth choosing. underneath the branding, it’s all the same thing. artists learn from others too. the question is whether you’re absorbing those influences into a point of view, or using them to avoid developing one. what are you trying to let someone feel, understand, or do? why this particular shape? what have you noticed that the existing tools don’t seem to notice? those questions don’t have answers you can borrow from a competitor’s roadmap. if we can make almost anything, deciding what deserves to exist becomes more important, not less. speed gives us more chances to exercise judgment. it doesn’t remove the responsibility. i don’t want a world where every person becomes a more efficient distributor of the same ideas. i want people to use these tools to go further into what they actually care about. to make things specific enough that we can feel someone behind them. what is the point of everyone being able to make something, if we all end up making the same thing?

efficiency, productivity, speed we keep worshipping these words like they are what we live for ship faster merge more manage more agents compress every loop remove every pause turn every hour into output but what is the point of endless production if there is no time left to think deeply? not react not optimize not summarize not clear the queue think to sit with a question long enough that your real intention starts to appear to find the purpose underneath the motion to ask whether the thing being accelerated should exist at all ai could be a new canvas a way to make strange things personal things impossible things tools, worlds, poems, games, interfaces, films, languages, rituals things that let more people touch the shape of their own imagination but instead, so much of it is becoming slop factories more content more funnels more tickets more fake work pretending to be value you can merge 2000 prs you can manage 500 agents you can wake up to dashboards proving that the machine kept moving while you slept but what is the point if you only sleep 5 hours a day? what is the point if you stop talking to other humans? stop learning about the past? stop playing? stop wandering? stop being surprised? what is the point if your whole life becomes optimizing the system that is consuming you? speed is not meaning scale is not wisdom automation is not freedom if it only makes everyone run faster and where are we running? toward what? a world where every person becomes a manager of machines, and every machine produces more things no one had the time to truly want? the danger is not that ai makes us lazy the danger is that ai makes us endlessly busy that it gives us infinite production before we have found intention infinite execution before we have developed taste infinite motion before we have learned how to be still maybe the real frontier is not more speed maybe it is discernment knowing what not to make knowing when to stop knowing when the most productive thing is to sleep, read history, call a friend, play with a cat, walk without tracking it, or stare at the ceiling until the false urgency dissolves tools should give us more life not turn life into a tool if ai is going to matter, it should not just help us produce more it should help us become more human more imaginative more free otherwise, it’s the same old factory just without humans