“I want THIS.”
AIs can be communication tools. No, not the ‘re-write this email so it’s less passive aggressive’ use of an LLM, but the ones like Claude Code / Codex, GPT Image, Suno, Meshy and others in less obvious ways. Ideas you have, you can now communicate what you want, without the domain knowledge or the vocabularly, and through iteration, turn an intention into a thing. The AI is an interpreter: you speak intent; it speaks code, pixels or notes.
Want a better meal tracking app than MyFitnessPal? Describe what you care about; done. Want to change the logo in an image? Done. Want a 13 song musical for your Dungeons & Dragon’s group? Done. (All real examples.)
Until recently, the price or the skills required create custom software or a bespoke ad campaign out of reach for most companies and individuals. You settled for what CapCut, Salesforce or Apple Photos could do.
“Describe it, try it, refine it” allows untrained people to explore areas where craft & domain knowledge used to fence off. Want to complain to your landlord? Done — in legal language your landlord understands. A rough version of the thing communicates intent better than any brief, and exposes flaws in the thinking faster than any description.
Some of the resistence is gatekeeping: You need to have put in the hard yards to learn how to draw, code or compose in order to or your output doesn’t ‘count’ as equivalent.* That conflates the thing with the making of it. How it’s made is still relevant — but it’s a separate question from what got made.
Of course, craft still matters. Expertise helps you see what’s wrong, understand constraints and make better choices. But professional polish isn’t always the goal. Sometimes you want something specific - either personal to you or bespoke for your client - more than you want it polished. And iterating at near-zero cost is itself how taste develops. “Not that — this” a hundred times is a form of practice.
The uncomfortable corollary: the same is true inside companies. The gap between having a vision and showing it is narrowing, which is bad news for anyone who has been hiding mediocrity in process. This is where you’ll see the Creative Deciders — the ones who pick from what’s put in front of them — separate from the Creative Directors, who say what it should be. (Oh hey, I might know some very good directors…) Now that you can manifest your vision, Trevor — let’s see it. And truly let the best idea win.
*For anyone who wants to argue this point: in 1859 Baudelaire called photography “the refuge of every failed painter, too poorly gifted or too lazy to finish his training”, and warned that, by bursting into art, it had become “its deadliest enemy”. Explain how your argument is different, and then I’ll respond. (Also, do you know how aggressively all apps want to turn an ’*’ into a •? It can be maddening if you really want a *)