I could never draw hands

My odd brain can come up with the strangest things.

I have played guitar with these fingers almost daily since I was very young. But the people I put on paper with a pencil always had rakes for hands.

AI helps me with that.

The same goes for building the most outrageous dashboards or apps. I never had the patience to get into programming, and now I vibe-code things I would not have thought possible until recently. I would recommend it to anyone.

I only came to appreciate writing later in life, and now I enjoy it. AI helps me put thoughts into words too. You do not want to know how abstract my prompts sometimes are. Anyone reading them discovers a new variant of doctor’s handwriting.

The gap between imagining and making

What is actually happening is this. There was always a gap between what I could imagine and what I could make, and that gap was filled by skill. Skill you build over years, or skill you hire in.

That gap is narrower now. Not gone. Narrower.

For me that means the hands in my drawings have become hands. The app in my head is on my screen. And the thought I could not write down is written down.

But I also know people who are exceptionally smart and cannot always express themselves equally well. For them this has nothing to do with convenience. They are being heard now. And then we tell each other there is “a bit of AI in there”.

What matters is the content.

Not one job has disappeared

The world is changing enormously fast. And that record keeps happily spinning, because the end is nowhere in sight. We are not even at side B.

Not dystopian, nor frightening, as far as I am concerned. We still do that part ourselves.

When I see how, and how fast, the use of AI is increasing in the office, I am proud. Proud of colleagues who are embracing it, some of them finally, and of the results we are putting up.

Not one job has disappeared. Jobs have changed.

And everything will change. Faster than when we said goodbye to ring binders, folders and hole punches and moved everything to digital. That felt like a rupture at the time too, and in hindsight it was simply a transition that took a few years.

The best camera in your pocket

And then the part I find most important.

The first digital cameras produced dreadful images. Now we carry the best and most versatile cameras in our trouser pocket.

But that does not make us good photographers.

The same is true of using AI. The better the model, the better the results. That much is true. But the model does half the work. The other half is knowing what you want, being able to see whether it is right, and having the taste to say: no, not like that.

That does not get easier as the tooling improves. It gets more important. Because if everyone has the same camera, the only remaining difference is who has something to say.

And for the rest it is just like playing guitar.

Practice, practice, practice.