When I see how quickly AI can turn an idea into a working product, I find myself genuinely impressed. It may work well, yet I’m not always sure what would make me come back to it. Of course, the same can be true of products built without AI. Still, it makes me wonder: when more people can build something useful, what will make us choose one product over another?
Until recently, turning an idea into a working product required a great deal of effort. Even if you had the idea, you still had to learn the necessary skills or find people who had them. AI reduces much of that friction. I’m excited by the possibility that more people will be able to test their ideas and build something people can actually use.
But building products faster does not give anyone more hours in the day.
As the number of things worth looking at grows, simply being well made will no longer be enough to earn attention. What will matter more is why someone should look at this particular thing at all—and why they should make room for it in their life.
That is why I think technological progress makes it even more important to return to first principles.
It may become easier to add another feature to an app, but it is still difficult to understand precisely what is frustrating the person using it. A beautiful object is not necessarily an object someone wants to live with for years. And when we become absorbed in everything that is newly possible, it is easy to lose sight of why we wanted to make something in the first place.
What inconvenience were we trying to remove? What feeling were we hoping to leave behind?
Returning to those questions also makes it easier to see what should be taken away.
The difficulty is that questions like these rarely have a correct answer. How much should we intervene in someone’s life in the name of convenience? How much should we change our taste in order to appeal to more people? Data can help us make those decisions, but it cannot decide what we should value.
When I talk about philosophy, this is what I mean: a set of principles for making choices. It has less to do with impressive statements written for an About page and more to do with what you are actually willing to keep—and what you are willing to give up.
Without those principles, every new tool expands the range of things you can do while quietly changing the thing you originally wanted to do.
Creativity is not separate from this.
I don’t particularly want to draw a line saying that AI merely imitates while humans alone are capable of genuine creation. AI can help us arrive at unexpected ideas and unfamiliar combinations too. But the reason one possibility among hundreds feels worth pursuing will still vary from person to person.
Some people cannot ignore a frustration that everyone else has learned to tolerate. Others notice a kind of beauty in an ordinary scene that they cannot quite explain. If they keep following that instinct—revising some things, discarding others—then even work made with the same tools begins to take on very different forms.
The more possibilities we have, the more room there may be for those differences to emerge.
But being different does not mean people will automatically notice.
That is where branding begins to matter.
Branding tells someone encountering you for the first time what they can expect, and gives them something to remember when they come back. A name and an image can help create that first impression. But if a product promises simplicity and feels complicated every time you use it, that promise will not survive for long.
Things change when someone has chosen you several times and been satisfied each time. Faced with similar options later, they begin to reach for the name they already know.
The standards of the builder have become a memory in the mind of the user.
Of course, AI can also write a compelling philosophy and an attractive brand story. Words alone will not preserve what makes something distinctive.
Can you remove a feature that might increase revenue because it compromises simplicity? Can you revise a design you personally love when people consistently respond poorly to it?
Choices have costs.
And it is while paying those costs that you discover whether the ideas you claimed to believe in were ever truly your principles in the first place.
Sometimes you also have to admit that you were wrong and change course. I suspect that a distinct point of view does not become clearer by stubbornly holding on to whatever you first said. It becomes clearer through making these judgments again and again.
I do not know how far AI will eventually develop. We will certainly have to keep learning new tools and capabilities.
But when I am able to build products faster, I do not want to spend all of that extra speed simply shipping more.
I would rather use some of it to return to the original question, revise something one more time, and pay attention to the details that still bother me.
On a day when twenty different versions are sitting on the screen in front of me, perhaps the real challenge will not be choosing the one that came out best.
It will be whether I can stop for a moment and ask:
Is the product I wanted to build in the first place actually somewhere among them?