One human. One AI assistant. You’re looking at something we made together.
The words, the colors, the images, the code. If you’re wondering what human intelligence working with AI might look like, you’re soaking in it.
I bring a fairly particular collection of interests. Art, music, geology, paleontology. Systems. Human behavior. Making things. Asking why someone needs six applications and a small ceremony to complete one task.
Some of this I studied in college. Some I learned through work. A considerable amount arrived through more than 450 audiobooks listened to over five years while making wire sculptures.
Then there are family, friends, conversations. Years of talking, listening, noticing, collaborating. Things that turn out to connect twenty years after you first encountered them.
Apparently, they’ve been getting acquainted.
Recently, one workplace found my position redundant.
I am finding their finding preposterous.
There is work I want to do, and now I have capable assistance doing it. Research, writing, design, code. I can follow an idea further without having to carry every part of it myself.
And I’m putting that energy into something that supports me.
Take this site’s colors. I wanted faded paper with accents that had some life in them. Egon Schiele was part of the conversation: delicate color, concentrated color, room around both.
Several attempts looked like the last sheets left in a school’s construction-paper cupboard.
Technically, they were colors.
I described what bothered me. The assistant offered another variation. We put it on an actual page, looked, and adjusted. Sometimes I hadn’t explained something well. Sometimes the assistant had confidently supplied something I hadn’t asked for.
We went places neither of us intended.
Then, eventually: there it is. That’s what I meant.
That recognition feels enormous. You’ve found the thing you were trying to explain, and now you can work with it.
The images have their own ancestry. Natural-history engraving. Dover books. Believable animals in questionable circumstances.
A honey badger presented as a gift says something about receiving a powerful tool you aren’t prepared to handle. It also makes me laugh.
I bring the references, the associations, and an opinion about whether the result works. Image generation gives us something to respond to. We develop it together.
The articles begin with things I’ve experienced, noticed, and wanted to say. We discuss them. We draft. I object to a phrase that sounds like someone has swallowed a consulting brochure. We revise.
When an argument needs evidence, we look for research and consider what it supports.
We’re seeking funding together, too: finding opportunities, working through applications, shaping proposals around things I want to build.
One of those things is Surface.
Surface is under development. It will bring connected activities into a shared place: making something, understanding what it is, finding where it belongs, getting it out into the world.
Its visual development draws on Russian Constructivism, El Lissitzky, Calder’s mobiles, Franz Marc, Bauhaus, Roz Chast, Hidden Folks. These give us ways to discuss structure, movement, color, humor, and discovery—and to test what might serve the person using it.
We’re also walking the working pathways before they’re all gathered into the product.
An idea needs research. An artwork needs a description, a price, somewhere to go. A possibility needs a proposal. Information should follow the work instead of requiring me to introduce it again at every stop.
Doing this together helps us discover what Surface needs to do.
The assistant didn’t arrive with this particular collection of interests. I did.
That’s why this looks the way it does.
And this is where I hope you recognize something.
You have your own collection. Things you know from work, things you love outside it. An ear for language. A fascination with how things fit together. Years of helping people understand something difficult. An interest that has never appeared in a performance review.
We contain multitudes. Job descriptions are somewhat less accommodating.
Capable assistance can give more of that accumulated life somewhere to go. You can explore a question, make something, learn what the next step involves, and get help taking it.
That deserves more ambition than a faster version of your existing task list.
Ask what you want to bring into your work. Ask your people, too. Give them room and support to find out.
I’m finding out here.
Recognize anything?