Tag: creativity

Categories
AI Programming Software Work

The Scarcest Thing

Garry Tan woke up at 8 a.m. after sleeping at 4. Not because he had to. Because he wanted to see what his workers had done overnight.

The workers are AI agents. Ten of them, running in parallel across three projects. And something about that sentence — wanted to see what they’d done — keeps stopping me. That’s not the language of someone using a tool. That’s the language of someone managing a team.

Tan gave a name to the state this puts him in: “cyber psychosis.” He said it as a joke. But the joke has an insight in it. He’s not describing addiction to a productivity app. He’s describing a shift in what it means to do creative work — the strange vertigo of becoming a director when you’d always been a laborer.

I’m retired. I watch this from the outside now, which is its own kind of vantage point. For most of my career, the path from idea to working product ran through people — through hiring and managing and the slow accretion of execution capacity. You had the vision or you didn’t, but either way you needed the team. The idea and the means of making it real were, structurally, separate things. The gap between them was where companies lived.

What Tan is describing is that gap closing.

The thing he built — gstack, his open-sourced Claude Code configuration — got dismissed in some quarters as “just prompts.” And it is just prompts, in the same way that a conductor’s score is just notation. The abstraction is the invention. What he encoded is a model of how a startup team thinks: the CEO who interrogates the why before a line of code gets written, the engineer who builds, the paranoid staff reviewer who looks for what breaks. Each role blocks a different failure mode. Blurring them together produces, as his documentation puts it, “a mediocre blend of all four.”

That’s an organizational insight. It has nothing to do with code.

Tan described being a “time billionaire” — not because his biological clock had slowed, but because he can now purchase machine-consciousness-hours. The bottleneck of implementation, which has governed every creative project since the beginning of creative projects, is dissolving for those who know how to direct.

The scarcest thing is shifting. It’s no longer the hours of execution. It’s the clarity of intent — knowing what you want to build and why the journey matters, before any of the workers start moving. That’s harder than it sounds. For decades, most of us could muddle through in the making of it. The act of building taught you what you were building. Now the making is cheap, and that shortcut is gone.

For someone watching from retirement, that’s not a small thing to absorb. The model I internalized over a long career — that ideas become real through sustained organizational effort, through teams and timelines and the grinding work of execution — is being revised faster than I expected. Not invalidated. Revised. The judgment still matters. The taste still matters. The why matters more than ever.

It’s just that the how has found new hands. Many of them. More than any team I ever assembled, available the moment the intent is clear enough to direct them, gone when the work is done. The constraint was always the hands. It turns out it was always the knowing.

Categories
Living Serendipity Travel

The Conditions of the Unexpected

There is a flight I took in 2001 that I have never fully stopped thinking about. Not the flight itself — a forgettable three-hour hop in a middle seat — but the two-hour delay that preceded it. The gate agent’s apologetic crackling over the intercom. The way I surrendered to the terminal, found a bar stool, ordered something I didn’t need. The man next to me was reading a book I recognized. We talked for two hours. He told me about a job. I didn’t take it — but I spent three months considering it, which is its own kind of detour. I came out the other side different in ways I still can’t fully account for.

I have told this story before as a story about luck. I’m not sure that’s what it is.

Alexander Krauss spent years going through the records of science’s major discoveries — Nobel Prize winners, the landmark non-Nobel findings, more than 750 in all — looking for the mechanism behind what everyone had been calling serendipity. The telescope trained on an unexpected patch of sky. Fleming’s contaminated petri dish. The chance observation that shouldn’t have meant anything but did.

What he found upended the romance of the story. The discoveries that seemed most accidental, most shaped by the caprice of an unlucky sneeze or a mislabeled sample, turned out to follow a pattern. Nearly all of them happened shortly after a researcher gained access to a new tool. The accidental observation of cells under an improved microscope. X-rays discovered through a discharge tube nobody had pointed in that direction before. The first planet beyond our solar system, caught by a spectrograph that hadn’t existed a few years earlier. What looked like lightning striking the same improbable spot again and again was actually the same thing each time: a new instrument creating the conditions under which something unexpected could be seen.

Krauss calls this “engineering serendipity.” The phrase stops me every time I read it, because it sounds like a contradiction and turns out to be the most practical sentence in the philosophy of discovery. You can’t engineer the specific surprise. But you can engineer the conditions that make surprise likely. You can build the lens before you know what it will show you.

This distinction — between engineering an unexpected discovery and engineering the conditions for unexpected discovery — is one I’ve been carrying around like a stone in my pocket. Because I think it applies far outside the laboratory. I think it’s one of the central design problems of a life.

The book trend critics are calling “Digital Nostalgia” is, depending on how you read it, either the most sentimental or the most diagnostic thing happening in literary culture right now. The novels topping lists this spring are full of people losing their recordings, waking up in centuries without algorithms, mourning the weight of analog things. Ben Lerner’s new novel begins with a dropped phone in a hotel sink — the recording gone, the moment unrecoverable. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear sends a social-media influencer back to an 1855 that is nothing like the one she curated for her followers: cold, filthy, unfiltered, and somehow more real.

What readers are reaching for in these books is not the past per se. It’s the texture of a life that wasn’t predicted in advance. The feeling of not knowing what came next because nothing had pre-sorted the possibilities. Nostalgia, in its root meaning, is pain at being far from home. What Digital Nostalgia seems to be mourning is something more specific: the disappearance of accident from everyday life.

I notice this in small ways. My phone knows where I’m going before I’ve decided to leave. The algorithm has predicted, with unsettling accuracy, what I will want to read next. The coffee shop I found by walking down an unfamiliar street now gets recommended to me, which is useful and also somehow diminishes the thing I found. The city I live in has become a more efficient version of itself. Less of it surprises me than used to.

This is not entirely bad. But something is lost in the smoothing. And the books people are buying tell you what.

The urbanist argument for cities has always included, at some level, an argument for density as a serendipity engine. You put people in proximity. You make them share transit and sidewalks and bars and parks. Intersections happen. Ideas cross. The great creative explosions of modern history — Florentine painting, Viennese psychoanalysis, the Bell Labs cafeteria — were products less of individual genius than of designed proximity. People who wouldn’t have met each other kept meeting each other.

What’s interesting about Krauss’s argument is that it generalizes this principle to the history of science in a way that makes it quantifiable. It’s not just that cities were generative because they were dense. It’s that they were generative because they were full of new tools — printing presses, coffeehouses, salons — that created new surfaces where minds could collide and refract in new ways. The tool doesn’t make the discovery. It makes the discovery possible, and likely, and reproducible by others.

Which brings me back to the airport bar.

The two-hour delay created an unstructured interval I hadn’t planned for. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I sat somewhere I wouldn’t normally have sat. The man next to me had a book that served as an opening. We were both temporarily outside our routines, which is another way of saying: we were both in a new instrument, looking at something we hadn’t known to look for.

What I’ve been slow to admit is that this kind of moment doesn’t just happen. It happens to people who are outside their routines. It happens in places where unlike people are forced into proximity. It happens when you sit down somewhere without your headphones, without a screen to retreat into, in the condition of being briefly unoptimized. The delay was the tool. The discovery followed.

So here is the tension I keep returning to: you can engineer the conditions for serendipity, but you cannot engineer serendipity itself, and the engineering has to be genuinely open-ended or it stops working. If you design a system that produces specific surprises, you haven’t built a serendipity engine. You’ve built a surprise dispenser, which is a different and lesser thing. Amazon’s “you might also like” feature is not serendipity. It is prediction wearing serendipity’s clothes.

The difference is whether the system preserves its capacity to show you something it didn’t know you needed to see. A new microscope could reveal anything. A recommendation algorithm reveals only a constrained neighborhood of the space of things you’ve already wanted. The former is a lens. The latter is a mirror.

I think this is what the Digital Nostalgia readers are grieving, without quite being able to name it: not the analog past itself, but the unoptimized interval. The moment between knowing what you wanted and finding it, when anything might happen. That space has been shrinking for twenty years, and the algorithm’s promise — to eliminate friction, to anticipate, to smooth — has turned out to be partly a promise to eliminate possibility.

The question I’m sitting with is whether it’s recoverable. Not globally — I’m not interested in the manifesto version of this argument, the call to smash the phones or return to the forest. But personally. Whether I can design my own life to include enough genuine aperture — enough unoptimized intervals, enough new tools, enough places where I am briefly outside my routine and available to be surprised — to keep the surprises coming.

I have some guesses about what this looks like. Reading outside my field. Saying yes to the conversation I don’t have time for. Choosing the longer route. Leaving earlier so the delay doesn’t feel like a crisis.

These are small things. They are also, if Krauss is right, approximately how all the important discoveries get made.

The flight eventually boarded. I didn’t take the job. But I thought about it for three months, which means I thought about my actual life for three months — what I wanted from it, what I was settling for, what I hadn’t been willing to name. The man at the bar didn’t change my path. He changed my angle of view, briefly, enough. I’ve been a little suspicious of smooth trips ever since.

Categories
Authors Books Business

The Whetstone of the Box

Give a team an unlimited budget and no deadline, and you almost guarantee their project will never ship. We spend our careers fighting for more runway, more resources, and a completely clear calendar, convinced that absolute freedom is the prerequisite for great work. Yet, when the walls finally fall away, we usually just freeze.

David Epstein’s upcoming book, Inside the Box, circles this exact paradox. His premise, arriving in early May, is that constraints do not diminish our capabilities; they forge them. We spend so much of our lives trying to escape boundaries, failing to recognize that those very boundaries are what give our efforts shape.

I think about the early days of writing code. We were working with severe memory limits—kilobytes, not gigabytes. Every line had to justify its existence. There was no room for bloat, no excess capacity to mask sloppy logic. It felt restrictive at the time, like trying to build a ship inside a bottle.

But that unforgiving physical boundary forced a ruthless elegance. You had to understand exactly what you were trying to accomplish. The constraint wasn’t an obstacle to the work; it was the whetstone that sharpened the blade.

We see this everywhere, once we learn to look for it. A photographer framing a shot with a fixed prime lens cannot rely on a zoom ring to find the picture; they have to physically move their feet. The limitation forces engagement with the physical world. Without the walls of a canyon, a river is just a swamp. It is the restriction that creates the momentum.

Epstein’s focus on how constraints make us better feels like a necessary corrective right now. We live in an era of infinite leverage and boundless digital canvases. The friction has been removed from almost everything we do.

But friction is where the traction lives. When we strip away all our limits, we don’t gain wings; we just lose our footing. We need the edges of the box to know exactly where we stand.

Categories
Living Space

Apollo’s Ghosts and the Artemis Return

I watched the Artemis mission splash down yesterday, a modern silver capsule returning from the silent void around the moon. It was a beautiful, flawless return, but watching it, I felt an unexpected tug of melancholy. It transported me back.

I remembered being a kid, mesmerized by the grainy, ghostly black-and-white television broadcasts of the early American space program. I remember the static, the deliberate countdowns, the collective held breath of a nation when the first man walked on the lunar surface. Space felt like the ultimate frontier—an endless trajectory of human ambition.

This morning, with those images still knocking around in my head, I listened to a podcast discussing the long, quiet gap in manned lunar exploration. And then, one commentator dropped a detail that stopped me in my tracks: the spacecraft for Apollo 18 and 19 had already been built. They were fully assembled. Ready to fly. And then, the program was simply killed.

I’ve been sitting with that quiet, heavy fact for a few hours now.

Think about the sheer human effort locked inside those unflown machines. The engineering, the late nights, the calculus, the welding of titanium, and the dreams of astronauts who trained for a lunar surface they would never touch. Those spacecraft became monuments to an aborted future. They are the physical embodiment of a decision to stop.

We do this in our own lives, don’t we?

We spend months, sometimes years, building the architecture of a new idea. We assemble the parts. We do the research, we write the drafts, we lay the groundwork for a career pivot, a new business, or a creative project. We build our own Apollo 18. We get it to the launchpad, fully fueled by our initial enthusiasm.

And then—we just stop. We pull the funding. We let the gravity of daily life, or the friction of doubt, kill the mission before the countdown even begins.

The tragedy of Apollo 18 wasn’t that it failed; it was that it was never given the chance to experience the friction of the atmosphere. It never left the safety of the assembly building.

We are taught that patience is a virtue, but sometimes patience is just stubbornness in disguise—an excuse for not hitting the ignition switch. We convince ourselves that the conditions aren’t quite right, that the budget isn’t there, or that the timing is off. We leave our greatest capabilities sitting in the hangar, slowly gathering dust.

The return of Artemis yesterday was a reminder that we can always go back. We can dust off the launchpad. But the compound interest of abandoned projects is a heavy debt to carry.

The chaos of launch isn’t an obstacle to the mission; it is the environment in which the mission earns its meaning.

If you have built something—if you have put in the time, the sweat, and the architecture—don’t leave it in the hangar. Let it fly. Even if it burns up, it is so much better to have launched than to remain perfectly intact and perfectly grounded.

Categories
Living Music Writing

The Tonic Chord of a Life

We spend a good portion of our lives surrounded by noise. Not just the literal kind—the hum of traffic or the ping of notifications—but the internal noise of unresolved tensions.

I was reminded of this while listening to a recent conversation between David Perell and the legendary journalist Tom Junod (https://youtu.be/JnHTUyZjwiY). Towards the end of their sprawling, beautiful discussion, Junod introduced a metaphor about writing that made me pause the audio and just sit with it for a moment. He talked about the “tonic chord.”

“Musicians, you know, back in the day, they were always looking for the tonic chord. And writing, I’m always looking for the tonic chord… where all the discordant harmonies are resolved in a single ba-boom, you know, at the end of Beethoven or whatever… looking for some sort of resolution to the stuff that gnaws at me.” [00:39:42]

It’s a striking image. In music theory, the tonic is the home base, the center of gravity. It is the chord that finally brings rest after a long sequence of tension and suspense. Without the preceding dissonance, the tonic chord has no power. The chaos isn’t an obstacle to the resolution; it is the very environment that makes the resolution meaningful.

This applies far beyond the blank page. We are all, in our own ways, searching for our tonic chords.

We carry around the stuff that gnaws at us—the contradictions in our relationships, the career choices that look good on paper but feel hollow in the chest, the quiet hypocrisies we tolerate in ourselves. These are the discordant notes. We spend so much of our lives trying to ignore them, turning up the volume on our daily routines to drown out the clash. Or we try to fix them with brute force, stubbornly demanding harmony before we’ve even listened to the melody.

But maybe the point isn’t to erase the tension. Junod’s genius—both in his essays and in this metaphor—is his willingness to sit with the discomfort. He looks directly at the friction. He places two opposing truths right next to each other, letting them rub like tectonic plates, waiting patiently for that final chord to finally release the pressure.

I think about the architecture of a well-lived life in much the same way. The most resonant moments I’ve experienced haven’t come from a smooth, unbroken string of successes. They usually arrive right after a period of intense confusion or struggle—a sudden moment of clarity on a foggy morning walk, a tough but honest conversation with a friend, or finally letting go of an idea that had lost its spark.

That sudden ba-boom of clarity. The release.

We are taught from childhood that a good life should be harmonious. But true harmony is earned. It requires us to listen closely to the discordant parts of our lives, to bear witness to our own messes and mysteries, and to patiently search for the truth that finally brings them all together.

Often, it is the ultimate act of self-awareness.

Seek serendipity.

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Categories
AI AI: Large Language Models Programming

The Era of the Synthesizer: How AI Is Liberating the Coder

For decades, being a programmer meant being a translator.

You stood in the gap between what someone wanted and what a machine could understand. You learned the syntax. You memorized the libraries. You once spent three hours hunting a missing semicolon that turned out to be hiding in line 847 of a file you were sure you’d already checked.

The New York Times Magazine recently ran a piece by Clive Thompson on what AI coding assistants — models like Claude and ChatGPT — are doing to that job. The anxiety in the piece is real. When you sit down with a modern AI assistant and watch it generate in seconds what used to take you days, it’s genuinely disorienting. Hard-won expertise suddenly feels less like a moat and more like a speed bump.

That reaction is honest. I’d be suspicious of anyone who didn’t feel it.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: what we’re losing is the translation layer. The boilerplate. The muscle memory of syntax. What we’re not losing is the part that was always the actual job — figuring out what to build and why it matters.

The soul of software was never in the code itself. The code was always just a means to an end.

Think about what happens when the mechanical friction of a craft disappears. Photographers stopped having to mix their own chemicals in the dark and started spending that time making better images. Musicians stopped having to hand-copy scores and started composing more. The freed-up capacity doesn’t evaporate — it gets redirected upward, toward the work that actually required a human all along.

The same shift is underway in software. When the AI handles the loops and the boilerplate and the database queries, what’s left is everything that required judgment in the first place. The architecture. The user experience. The question of whether this thing should exist at all, and in what form, and for whom.

We’re moving from the how to the why. That’s not a demotion.

It does ask something of us, though. The old identity — programmer as master of arcane syntax — has to be relinquished. And letting go of a hard-earned identity is genuinely hard, even when what’s replacing it is better. That quiet grief the Times piece captures is worth sitting with, not dismissing.

But after you sit with it for a minute: we are entering the era of the synthesizer.

The synthesizer’s job is to hold the vision, curate the logic, and direct the output toward something that actually resonates with another human being. Empathy. Intuition. The ability to sense when something is almost right and know which direction to push it. These aren’t soft skills. They’re the whole game now.

The clatter of keyboards is fading. But the music we’re about to make — with AI doing the heavy lifting on the mechanics — has a lot more room to breathe.

Categories
Creativity Writing

The Crucible of the Blank Page

There is a distinct, often uncomfortable silence that accompanies a blank page. It’s not a lack of noise, but rather an overwhelming cacophony of unformed ideas waiting to be given shape.

We often operate under the assumption that we must have our thoughts perfectly ordered before we sit down to express them. We believe writing is merely the act of transcribing a fully formed philosophy from mind to paper.

But the truth is far messier, and infinitely more profound.

Flannery O’Connor captured this beautifully when she admitted:

“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

I find myself returning to this admission constantly, deeply resonating with the reality of it. I’m the same way.

The human mind is a brilliant but chaotic place, a swirling ether of impressions, emotions, half-remembered conversations, and half-baked theories. Left to its own devices, it rarely settles on a singular, coherent truth. It requires the friction of articulation—the physical, deliberate act of putting words into a sequence—to force those nebulous clouds into something solid.

In an era increasingly defined by the allure of frictionless output, there is a profound temptation to skip this wrestling match.

We are surrounded by tools and shortcuts designed to hand us the finished essay, the polished insight, the perfectly packaged takeaway without us having to endure the messy, chaotic energy of the drafting process. It is easy to look at the blank page as a hurdle to be cleared rather than a necessary landscape to be traversed. But bypassing that struggle is a critical mistake.

You cannot skip the work of wrestling with ideas. That struggle is not a barrier to good writing; it is the core chaotic energy that underpins it. It is the crucible where conviction is forged.

When you wrestle with a sentence, striking it out, rewriting it, abandoning it entirely for a new thought, you are not just editing text on a screen. You are editing your own mind. You are testing the structural integrity of your beliefs.

The chaotic energy of a rough draft—the fragmented sentences, the sudden leaps of logic, the tangents that seem to lead nowhere—is evidence of a mind actively searching for meaning.

It is through this very friction that we discover what we actually believe.

An idea might feel profound when it is floating weightlessly in your head, but the moment you try to pin it down with language, its flaws and hollow points become glaringly obvious. Writing forces a confrontation with our own intellectual blind spots.

If we outsource this process, or if we try to circumvent the chaos by relying on templates or taking the path of least cognitive resistance, we lose the very mechanism by which we come to know ourselves. We might successfully produce text, but we will not produce insight.

The value of writing isn’t just in the final product meant for a reader’s eyes; it is in the transformation that occurs within the writer.

To write is to step into the unknown spaces of your own intellect. It is an act of revelation as much as communication.

So, the next time you find yourself staring at a blank page, feeling the chaotic energy of unformed thoughts, don’t retreat.

Lean into the mess. Let the words spill out, rough and unpolished, and trust that in the wreckage of your early drafts, you will finally read what you say, and in doing so, discover exactly what you think.

Categories
Apple

The MacBook Neo

Reading the overwhelmingly positive reviews of the new MacBook Neo I am reminded of this from the recent book Apple in China:

“Engineers said the pressure to put in the long hours was all but mandatory. Indeed, a decade later after Jobs created Apple University, a corporate institution meant to convey his values to a new generation of employees, Apple came close to codifying the principle that pushing employees to burnout was acceptable.

In a slide deck called Leadership Palette, Apple states: “Fighting for excellence is about resisting the gravitational pull of mediocrity. It involves being dead tired and still pushing yourself, and others, to get it right, every time.”” (Patrick McGee, Apple in China)

Categories
Authors Storytelling Writing

The Architecture of Resonance

There’s a particular kind of madness that strikes writers late at night, or in the stagnant hours of mid-afternoon, when you find yourself staring at a single sentence for twenty minutes.

You’re weighing a semicolon against an em dash. You’re wondering if “murmur” is too soft or if “whisper” is too cliché. All of this while knowing, with complete certainty, that no reader will ever stop to appreciate this specific choice. They’ll just read the sentence and move on.

So why do we do it?

In Draft No. 4, John McPhee — the legendary literary journalist who spent decades at The New Yorker — shares a principle he still writes on the blackboard at Princeton. It’s actually a quote from Cary Grant: “A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.” The implication, McPhee explains, is that almost no individual detail is essential, while the details as a whole are absolutely essential.

I find this idea endlessly useful. And a little reassuring.

Think about walking into a beautifully designed home. You don’t notice the precise angle of the crown molding or the specific undertones of the paint. You don’t walk in and say, “Ah yes, Alabaster White.” You just feel warmth, or elegance, or comfort. The impression is singular — but it’s entirely built from a thousand invisible decisions someone made before you arrived.

Writing works the same way. The rhythm of your sentences, the specificity of your verbs, the way a paragraph ends — these are the details. Individually, they’re expendable. Swap “murmur” for “whisper” and the piece survives. Delete the semicolon and the world keeps turning.

But collectively, they are the piece.

Start compromising — reach for the easy cliché, let a clunky transition slide, settle for vague where you could be specific — and the foundation slowly rots. The reader won’t be able to name the moment they lost interest. They’ll just close the tab. The impression shifts from resonant to flat, without anyone quite knowing why.

Writing, then, is an act of quiet faith. It asks you to labor over things no one will applaud. Nobody claps for an em dash. But the work isn’t really for applause — it’s out of respect for the whole.

We curate a thousand invisible things so the reader can feel one visible truth.

So the next time you’re agonizing over a single word at midnight, remember: you’re not just picking a word. You’re placing a tile in a mosaic. Cary Grant understood it. McPhee put it on a blackboard. You might as well make it count.

Categories
AI Google Google Gemini

Fun with Nano Banana 2

Google just released a new version of its image creation tool Nano Banana. It’s pretty amazing at creating all kinds of images.

On X a prompt was shared that I wanted to try out:

I need a flowchart for how to scramble eggs, make it as wacky and over the top and complicated as possible.

So I gave it a try:

Here are a couple of additional examples:

What a McKinsey partner does to prepare for a client’s board meeting presentation

The credit and debit card systems in the U.S.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology

Pretty amazing! Conceiving and drawing one of these “flowcharts” would take me many hours!