A large part of what I do professionally is translation. I translate complicated technologies and ideas into words and visual metaphors that people can easily understand.

Some of that understanding is conceptual: often the problems come from not only how teams talk about themselves publicly, but how they think about themselves internally.

I frequently talk to technical teams that acknowledge that their sales materials aren’t strong enough, that their website presence isn’t putting them in the best light, and that none of their marketing adds up to the value they truly create.

Not only do they struggle to diagnose this problem, they have no idea how to fix it if or when they do.

So what can you do, if this sounds like you?

It’s easier than you think. I’m guessing you’ve successfully sold your product, otherwise you wouldn’t be in business. That tells us that something vital is happening in your real customer conversations that isn’t happening in any of your materials.

When I work with new clients, the first thing I do is listen. A lot. I say “Explain what you do to me like I’m an absolute idiot.” Which is easy for them to do, because I am.

Typically after 20–30 minutes of getting it all out, they will say 1–2 sentences that are the actual core of the value they provide.

In this case, I usually stop them and say: “Did you hear what you just said? Those two sentences were more powerful than anything I’ve seen on your website or anywhere else.”

But it happened organically. Not because you sat and thought about it, or because you prompted AI to tell you what makes you valuable.

As you reached for the right words for 30 minutes, you found them once, and didn’t even realize you did.

So if you are successful in sales but bad at marketing, pay closer attention to what you say in real conversations that actually works. My guess is that language is nowhere to be found in any of your public positioning statements.

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I was inspired to build a fractal explorer with AI that also reacts to music (of course), after reading Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin.

This book is an excellent primer on chaos theory and how complex systems can emerge from simple mathematical formulas, including how life itself can emerge from primordial soup!

Fractals are a great example of the kind of structures that are found everywhere in the universe, including possibly the most famous visual representation, the Mandelbrot fractal.

Even though this book was written before AI, it explains exactly the way AI will achieve Recursive Self-Improvement in the near future as a series of logical steps already set in motion.

As a professional designer, I’m much less interested in what generative AI does to replace human talents (what the internet lovingly refers to as AI slop). I’m much more interested in the intersection between mathematics and design, something AI coding tools are uniquely poised to help us with.

How can we generate design concepts at the atomic level using mathematics? This book and a few weekends of messing around with AI code will get us to some amazing new heights here.

The future is about how talented people can think with these tools and have fun with them, not about how these tools can replace what makes us human.

Keep exploring, y’all!

Or else its viewpoint will confuse our own.

When you ask an LLM to write for you, it will feel great until you realize that it’s not actually your voice or what you’re trying to say.

When you ask an agent to design for you, it will look great, until you realize that the design is non-specific and the same as everyone else out there.

When you ask AI to do anything for you, accepting its output as-is is a dangerous trap we all have to fight hard to avoid.

I say we have to fight hard, because our agents are constantly lulling us into sleep. Into accepting their opinions. Claude laid out my webpage like this, so it must be right!

Push back. Prompt philosophically. Use it as a tool, but don’t relinquish command.

Add context. Add nuance to your prompts. Add the “why”.

The danger is to let an agent do the thinking for us, and to let its taste override our own.

Use it as a tool in your arsenal of many tools.

But constantly ask yourself: Am I using AI, or is it using me?

It’s been doing the rounds that someone is giving away clones of all Adobe software, all coded with AI.

And I get it: How many of us yearn to be free from the shackles of every monthly subscription, bleeding us dry, like so many paper cuts?

And to be clear, what Brandon Thomas has done is EXACTLY what smart people should be doing right now, and I applaud him for his ambitious effort, really!

But here’s what people don’t understand yet about building software with AI:

The surface level is just the beginning.

What makes Adobe Adobe isn’t the GUI or the obvious features we can see in Photoshop.

It’s the millions of decisions that have gone into decades of development.

It’s the feedback from millions of designers relying on the tools professionally for their entire careers.

Our regular brains can look at today’s Photoshop and see how its lineage traces back to the very first version, released on Apple computers in 1990.

Software is an organic process. No one could have predicted in 1990 what graphic designers would need in 2027. And yet, many of the design cues from that era are still alive today, just with a different coat of liquid glass on top of them.

Software is a conversation.

And great software is a conversation that’s been running for decades.

So our normal brains understand that commercial software is a process. Our AI mania brains fool us into thinking we can rebuild Adobe’s suite in a weekend.

That’s not true.

We'll never replicate the 30+ years of user feedback, bug reports, and workflow refinements that make the original software truly powerful, or at least, it will take us 30+ years to do it and we’ll have to relearn everything Adobe already knows.

But what IS true is that AI allows more of us to engage in the process of enterprise software building. It democratizes the building of these tools.

Unless you’re willing to devote the next 10+ years of your life to building your weekend clone, one painstaking feature at a time, Adobe will always be worth the money.

AI isn’t a magic bullet. It just democratizes coding, bringing the time and cost down exponentially. It doesn’t mean time, effort, and feedback loops no longer have meaning.

And it takes people like Brandon pushing the envelope of open source software to inspire us all to push harder and dare to dream bigger, and to challenge stagnant corporations.

But we’re all going to learn that the true value of software isn’t the coding. It’s the conversation. And that takes time.

Bad designer: The work is ugly AND doesn’t function well (most live here).

Good designer: The work is beautiful, functions well, but isn’t justifiable with powerful metaphors (most people using AI live here).

Great designer: All the small and large elements form a cohesive whole, in which each element helps tell the larger story (the holy grail!).

The simple question to ask of each component: Why is this element the way it is? Is it random? Is it just a shiny object? Or is there a defensible reason for why it works like that? Why it looks like that?

Do the macro and micro elements work together or against each other? Or was something done just because “it looks cool”?

Apply this ruthlessly, and watch your storytelling get better and better.