My observations on the fundamentals required to succeed with AI, and the importance of redesigning your whole factory once you get AI working for you.

Soccer players run a lot. A professional soccer player will run 6–8 miles per game. I was not a professional soccer player, but I did grow up playing soccer, and I grew up running a lot. I played soccer throughout my school years and even played some rec soccer into my 20s. When I moved to San Jose, CA I found myself without the time and network to play soccer, but I wanted to stay fit, so I thought: I ran a lot in soccer, why don’t I just take up distance running. Immediately, I found myself signing up for a half marathon.

A quickie today. I spent a big chunk of the day building (and refining) an AI workflow that ate 6 slide decks, re-cut them, wrote a 20 minute script, and generated an entirely new presentation. Then it did the whole thing again. And again. Three full passes, and it never produced anything good enough to actually share.

Ultimately though, what I was left with was: nobody needed this presentation - it was a nice to have. Before AI, I never would have made it. The cost was too high to bother, and that would have been completely fine. The work didn’t get done because it didn’t need doing. What changed isn’t that the work got more valuable. It’s that it got cheap enough to do anyway.

I’ve wanted a blog, website, or homepage since I created my first GeoCities page (eat it Angelfire). I might have told you a variety of reasons (sharing photographs, documenting trips, liveblogging my emotions) but at the core, the motivation was ego: I thought I had smart things to say, and writing them down meant people would read them and tell me they were smart. Can’t imagine I’m alone in that pursuit, and I can’t imagine that I’m the only one to abandon half-written about-me pages, or just run out of ideas to fuel more content.