The work is the point — Kelford Labs Daily

I’ve been doing some AI-assisted software development lately, trying out the new tools to make sure I stay up on what’s happening in that world.

And my foray into software is reminding me why AI is useful without being credible.

I mean, it’ll generate coding ideas that are logically consistent, easy to implement, and completely ridiculous. It’ll propose (and sometimes build, if I don’t catch it in time) the most roundabout solutions to simple problems, or overly simplified expediencies for tricky challenges.

I’m building an AI-powered video game, and there’s just not a lot of training data on the internet about that topic, relatively speaking. So a lot of its assumptions about how to build the game are just wrong.

(It wants to hardcode things that should be handed off to the LLM, for instance, but it doesn’t know any better)

Even though there are a near-infinite number of coding best practices on the Internet, I’m stretching it just a little bit out of the distribution of content and it’s already faltering under the stress.

AI is making me faster, yes, but it’s not making me obsolete, or indifferent to its outputs.

I still have to do a huge amount of work (which is good! And fun!)

But that’s why it worries me when people have AI make all their marketing content for them.

If you’re doing things right, you’re doing things differently. You’re out of distribution from the norm and the average.

And an LLM just doesn’t have the training data to support its knowledge of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

It’ll fall back to parroting what it knows about your category, your industry, or marketing generally.

I could let the LLM lead my coding project toward a solution that’s easier for it to build. Something it’s seen before, a million times already.

That would be easier. That would be even faster.

And it would be pointless. Because why would I want to build something that’s already been built?

Why would anyone want to do marketing that’s already been done?

The whole point of marketing is to stand out by being different. By being unique.

And uniquely suited to help our very best clients.

No LLM or AI tool knows what makes you special, and even if you tell it, you’ll have to constantly remind and reinforce it.

Because it will be inexorably pulled back toward the average. To the probable.

If I want to make a cool project no one’s seen before, I’ve got to do a lot of the work.

And if you want to do marketing that gets noticed because it sets you apart, so do you.

Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!

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