I would go way further. Everything I ever wrote -- every last thing -- is a failure to execute an idea that was never half as good as what I ended up with. Ideas are cheap. Their only value is to set the process in motion. (1/n)
So many times, the entire nature of what I'm working on has changed because of things I've discovered during the "tedious" work that they claim AI will save me from. It's in fact extremely common that I don't know what a thing really is until I start trying to do the hard stuff and then I find out
Dec 16, 2025 21:38Creativity is no place for gnosticism! It isn't some crude, hopeless grasping for a Golden World of Perfect Ideas that we can never touch! It's the process by which you discover what wondrous and real thing your *idea* was crudely grasping for from the start!
The primacy of the idea, all this elevation of the idea over the actual work, is nothing but the radioactive cultural fallout of the executive aristocracy. The divine right of kings but for venture capitalists: as if billionaires become billionaires because of their magical billion-dollar ideas.
As if you, reading this, could have such an idea and by having it become a billionaire too. As if that would make the idea itself worth a billion dollars -- a tiny crystal of pure genius growing from the rock of self. As if that's how anything in the world has ever worked.
You'll probably never have an idea that no one else has ever had, because that's not how human cognition works. And yet you have the power to execute even the blandest and most common idea in ways that no other human being, living or dead or yet unborn, would ever do.
And that's what these LLM salesmen are so benevolently offering to relieve you of: the entire point of everything.
