Signals #004: What Doesn't Compress

There is a useful frame for the AI moment that has been quietly emerging in the writing of the last few months. The work we do, it suggests, splits roughly into two halves. There is the half that produces — the rendering, the executing, the building, the delivering. And there is the half that decides — what to make, what to attend to, what to leave alone. AI is rapidly compressing the first half. It is doing comparatively little to the second. And the gap between what AI can and cannot do is becoming the gap between what we delegate and what we keep. This is the throughline of the pieces below, and a thought I’ve been chewing on in my own writing as well. In Closer, Not Higher a few weeks ago, I argued that the conventional wisdom about design leadership — that good leaders rise above the details — is exactly backwards in an AI-driven field, because the part the machine cannot do for us is the part that requires more, not less, attention to detail. Several writers this week make a…