Here’s what nags at me about where AI is heading: we’re getting very good at compounding artifacts and very bad at compounding thinking. Tokens go up, output goes up, cost goes up, and somehow the actual thinking doesn’t accumulate. It just gets produced and discarded.
There’s a real loss in that. When someone’s artifact isn’t good, the whole thing gets thrown away and hidden, but part of their thinking inside it could have been genuinely interesting. We throw out the reasoning along with the draft. And the internet has trained us to believe we can’t share anything until it’s fully fleshed out, or we’re some loser, which makes it worse.
I think AI is quietly teaching us that the artifact is the only thing that matters. I’m here to say the thinking matters, and that connecting and refining the thinking is the part worth keeping.
Where does your best thinking go when the artifact it lived in gets thrown away?