// Rocket Boots for Terrible Ideas
Creativity is powered by friction.
Third of five, following on from My Reconditioned iPod. About what happens to creative work when the friction gets designed out of it. Design systems, Figma agents, and the difference between producing output and having something to say.
Also: a frozen risotto, a component library nobody had to think about, and why the operating was never the differentiator.
What it does to creative work
Creativity is powered by friction.
The blank page. The decision about what to make and why it matters. The tolerance for the period when it isn’t working yet. I experience this every time I sit down to make music. The early part of a session, before anything has taken shape, is uncomfortable. You have to push through it to get anywhere. That’s the part that makes it yours.
Low-friction creative tools let you skip it. Autocomplete, generative defaults, template culture. You can produce output without forming intent. The work exists. It just wasn’t aimed at anything.
I’ve heard this from hiring managers recently. A growing portion of early-career designers have never worked without a component library or design system. They can produce the output. They struggle to explain why they made the decisions they made. The reasoning was already baked into the tool. The intent came pre-rolled.
Claude can already work inside Figma. Open the file, read the component library, assemble a page from it. That’s the exact motion the Figma Operator role was built on. Not originating a system. Operating one someone else designed. If an agent can do the operating, the operating was never the differentiator.
The designers who tend to thrive today are the ones who came up mocking things from scratch, then adopted design systems, then AI. I’d say that carefully, since it’s the path I took. They understand why things work because they had to make them work manually first. Now they can move fast because they know where they’re going.
I use tools. I use AI tools. I find them useful. The ones worth worrying about are the ones that remove the decision along with the effort. They skip the part where you had to know what you were making, and for whom, and why it mattered.
The most interesting work is where you use AI to help you make your own tools, but more on that in a later post.
If you don’t come to AI with a strong sense of what you want and why, you’re the one who’s artificially intelligent. AI is rocket boots for terrible ideas. Bring your intelligence, your curiosity, your taste and your conviction to it, and it becomes a genuinely powerful tool for your thinking.
Nielsen Norman Group made a related point in their State of UX 2026 report. UX Roles will increasingly demand breadth and judgment, not just artifacts. The practitioners who thrive are the ones who treat design as strategic problem solving rather than producing deliverables. That’s been my approach for as long as I can remember. Not because it’s suddenly the smart career move. Because deliverables without strategy are just output.
The result is a lot of work that’s technically created but not authored. Competent. Fast. Forgettable. And because the tools trend toward the average of everything that already exists, it converges. Without intent, creative work regresses toward the mean. Volume replacing vision.
Clara Gaggero Westaway from Special Projects has a phrase for it. The frozen risotto problem. Faster than the real thing but missing the details that made it worth having.
An ocean of the adequately similar.
An ocean of artificial intelligence.
More on what that homogenisation costs, next: An Ocean of Artificial Intelligence.
I'd love to tell you more.
// My Reconditioned iPod
I go for walks without my phone now. Just me and whatever I loaded before I left the house.
Second of five, following on from The Intention Economy. A short one, about what a deliberately limited piece of technology teaches you about choosing what you want, and a subway ad that stumbled onto the same idea by accident.
Also: a walk without a phone, a search that makes you remember the name of the thing you’re after, and a Game Boy with a heart drawn on it.