it now takes more effort to produce less
There used to be a time, if you can imagine, where it used to take effort to produce anything worthy at all. Then suddenly, it became way too easy. And then the strangest of things happened, it now takes more effort to produce less.
We find ourselves in a strange new world, we have a lottery machine in our town, in every town, and plenty of them. Anyone can pull the lever and win, and win so much. We keep pulling because we want the jackpot, however we no longer know what the jackpot is. We only know what it used to be. It used to be getting that feature out, it used to be finishing that paper, it used to mean, at one point, making your profile page sparkle. Making was scarce, and so making was part of the prize.
The lottery machine, or the wishing well, now grants every wish, and when every wish is granted the concept of a wish quietly dies.
We all experience this every time a new frontier model comes to town. I have a friend who got swept up in it when Anthropic released Fable. He began pulling the lever. App after app, feature after feature, thirteen hours a day. Immense possibilities lay before him and he was not going to let any go to waste. He never stopped to ask who else might be pulling the same lever. Four days and one emergency department visit later, he understood: anything he could generate so easily, others could too. He immediately pivoted, he worked on improving the apps he already had users for, and boy did the users come.
We treat this new machine as a direct path to the jackpot, and so the error is easy to make, yet the jackpot has moved. While the prize used to include making, increasingly it lies in deciding what is worth keeping. The old jackpot was the new thing. The new jackpot is the long thing, chosen from an explosion of possibilities, and kept alive through care.
While we are still trying to understand what the new craft is, for now it includes accumulated judgement. That includes knowing your users well enough to reject the tiny compromise in version 482 that you know will annoy them in six months. It is noticing the eccentricity that has become the product's identity and protecting it from a beautiful alternative, an easy choice to sometimes make.
The jackpot has moved. It is now in choosing, and refining one of the infinite possibilities and sticking with it long enough for judgement to accumulate. To conform into a shape no single generation could ever have produced.
The machine is a portal to endless beginnings, can we choose to not pick another one?