convergence to the mean when everyone looks at everyone else to decide what to make, we eventually stop making anything of our own. we copy what works. borrow the language, the aesthetic, the features. we call it learning from the market, following best practices, staying competitive. together, everything starts to feel familiar. polished, interchangeable. nothing wrong. nothing alive. the mean isn’t necessarily bad. it’s where everything lands when we remove the reasons for it to be different. numbers are easier to compare than feelings, so we make things that produce numbers. we study what gets attention, then shape ourselves around it. eventually the feedback stops informing the work and starts authoring it. we’re no longer asking what we want to say. we’re asking what will be rewarded for saying. ai makes this loop frictionless. it can draw from more references than we could see in a lifetime. but access to every perspective isn’t the same as having one. it hasn’t lived a particular life that makes one detail unbearable and another beautiful. when we ask it to choose for us without bringing any intention of our own, we get something plausible, easy to approve. then we ship it, measure it, copy it, and feed it back into the next round. a tidal wave of mid. this changes not just the work, but the people making it. we describe ourselves in categories platforms can distribute and markets understand. designer. founder. creator. pick a niche. build a brand. be consistent. the parts that don’t fit become inconvenient, even when those contradictions might produce our most interesting work. we become easier to classify and harder to tell apart. i think we need to approach making things more like artists. an artist develops a perspective through the work. making, noticing, choosing, failing, returning. learning what matters even when nobody else cares. craft gives that perspective a form precise enough for someone else to experience. the life outside the work matters too. the places you’ve lived, the people you’ve loved, the things you’re embarrassed to care about. these aren’t distractions from having something to say. they’re how you come to have something to say. we understand this with music, paintings, photographs, movies. we expect a person to be present in the choices. we want to experience something we wouldn’t have encountered without them. software can do this too. a piece of software expresses beliefs about how life should feel. what deserves your attention. what you should be free to change. whether a task should feel like paperwork or play. even a small interaction can carry someone’s care, humor, or curiosity. but we rarely talk about software as a medium. we talk about it as an industry. markets to capture, workflows to optimize, competitors to catch up with. we add a feature because someone else has it, without asking whether it belongs. products accumulate the same parts and lose what made them worth choosing. underneath the branding, it’s all the same thing. artists learn from others too. the question is whether you’re absorbing those influences into a point of view, or using them to avoid developing one. what are you trying to let someone feel, understand, or do? why this particular shape? what have you noticed that the existing tools don’t seem to notice? those questions don’t have answers you can borrow from a competitor’s roadmap. if we can make almost anything, deciding what deserves to exist becomes more important, not less. speed gives us more chances to exercise judgment. it doesn’t remove the responsibility. i don’t want a world where every person becomes a more efficient distributor of the same ideas. i want people to use these tools to go further into what they actually care about. to make things specific enough that we can feel someone behind them. what is the point of everyone being able to make something, if we all end up making the same thing?

efficiency, productivity, speed we keep worshipping these words like they are what we live for ship faster merge more manage more agents compress every loop remove every pause turn every hour into output but what is the point of endless production if there is no time left to think deeply? not react not optimize not summarize not clear the queue think to sit with a question long enough that your real intention starts to appear to find the purpose underneath the motion to ask whether the thing being accelerated should exist at all ai could be a new canvas a way to make strange things personal things impossible things tools, worlds, poems, games, interfaces, films, languages, rituals things that let more people touch the shape of their own imagination but instead, so much of it is becoming slop factories more content more funnels more tickets more fake work pretending to be value you can merge 2000 prs you can manage 500 agents you can wake up to dashboards proving that the machine kept moving while you slept but what is the point if you only sleep 5 hours a day? what is the point if you stop talking to other humans? stop learning about the past? stop playing? stop wandering? stop being surprised? what is the point if your whole life becomes optimizing the system that is consuming you? speed is not meaning scale is not wisdom automation is not freedom if it only makes everyone run faster and where are we running? toward what? a world where every person becomes a manager of machines, and every machine produces more things no one had the time to truly want? the danger is not that ai makes us lazy the danger is that ai makes us endlessly busy that it gives us infinite production before we have found intention infinite execution before we have developed taste infinite motion before we have learned how to be still maybe the real frontier is not more speed maybe it is discernment knowing what not to make knowing when to stop knowing when the most productive thing is to sleep, read history, call a friend, play with a cat, walk without tracking it, or stare at the ceiling until the false urgency dissolves tools should give us more life not turn life into a tool if ai is going to matter, it should not just help us produce more it should help us become more human more imaginative more free otherwise, it’s the same old factory just without humans

leaving leaving is the process from fullness into emptiness from the familiar circle of life the routines undone the streets i knew by heart the people i kept meeting the names and labels that had gathered on my skin toward a place entirely unknown where a new life waits to be written before i go i take out everything i had hidden in my heart and say goodbye to it piece by piece memory rises and feeling rises with it one by one i empty the rooms within me until i am almost as i was when i first arrived unfurnished unclaimed open what remains is a blankness echoing with my fear of loneliness my longing for freedom and the questions i still cannot answer what is freedom what is happiness when i first came here i was drifting in a river carried by the current thinking only of making things now i have to place my own hands on the helm no longer mistaking the waves for fate or the shore for salvation i will miss the days i lived here but i must learn again how to sleep inside loneliness how to eat inside uncertainty how to recognize desire in the blank and through the act of leaving turn freedom from an idea into a life i practice every day

I wrote an in-depth article on how I made @cursor_ai’s icons. Read it if you want to know: - How to keep 600+ icons consistent - Why I made optical adjustments nobody can see - Why the icon stroke weight is 1.25px (who does that, really?) - Why I drew 156 almost identical versions of a hamburger icon …and much, much more!

Introducing Grok Bot, now in early beta. Bots are AI teammates that do real work for you. They sign in to your tools, use them just like you do, and come back with finished work.

i left Cursor. after 10 years inside the tech bubble in San Francisco, Cursor felt like the sharpest version of that world – fast, intense, ambitious, full of people trying to pull the future closer. i’m leaving with gratitude, but also with the feeling that i need a different rhythm. slower time. different weather. more culture, aliveness, and humans in the everyday. Asia feels like the right place to begin again. to stay grounded, experience life more fully, and build freely. i’ll share what i find along the way!

my early mentors were these apps, especially Rdio, Mailbox, and Apple they made new patterns that made software feel simpler and intuitive to touch as we leave the world of apps behind, what parts of software will remain visible, and how could it feel?

when the dream becomes the job i used to think the dream was to make my hobby my work. to spend my life close to the things i loved: computers, tools, interfaces, systems, tiny details, the feeling of making something from nothing. the things i used to do at night, after school, after work, in the margins of life, somehow became the center of my life. and it is a dream. i don’t want to pretend otherwise. there is a very specific happiness in getting paid to care. in meeting other people who care. in building a language around your obsession. in seeing something that lived only in your head become real enough for other people to touch. but there is also a quiet pain in it. because the thing that once belonged only to you no longer belongs only to you. it becomes attached to deadlines, teams, customers, strategy, money, reputation, momentum... curiosity becomes roadmap. taste becomes decision-making. play becomes output. the thing you once used to escape the world becomes the thing through which the world reaches you. and now there is another strange layer: the machines are getting good at the work too. not just the boring parts. the parts that used to feel close to the heart. writing, coding, designing, reasoning, making taste-like decisions, turning vague ideas into something real. the things we once used as proof that we had something special inside us are becoming things a model can approximate, remix, and sometimes do faster. that can feel scary in a very specific way. not only because of jobs or competition, but because it touches the myth you built around yourself. if the thing i became good at can be done by a machine, then what part of it was really me? i think that question is painful because it arrives at the same place. the original love. before the title, before the company, before the taste became a role, before the work became useful to other people, there was a small fire inside. curiosity. obsession. the feeling that the world became more alive when you understood a little more of it, or made a tiny piece of it bend to your will. AI can make the output faster. it can even raise the floor of the craft. but it cannot want on your behalf. it cannot decide what is worth loving. it cannot protect the strange private thread that made you care in the first place. maybe that is what becomes more important now. not whether you can still produce the artifact by hand. not whether you can outperform the machine at every task. that game is already changing. the real question is whether you still have a relationship with the source. the part with no audience. no roadmap. no deadline. the part that can wander, collect strange references, make useless things. follow beauty, be wrong, be slow, be you, be true. because that part is not separate from the work. it is the source of the work. if you lose it, you can still operate. you can still manage the machine. you can still prompt, review, decide, ship, and keep things moving. but the work becomes thinner. safer. more explainable. less alive. so maybe the real discipline is not to work harder, rest more, or care less. maybe it is to keep returning to the place where the love began – before it became useful, before it became legible, before anyone needed anything from it, before even the machine could mirror it back to you. not to escape the work. to make sure the fire inside is still alive.