Creativity is the new moat
inventbuild.studio
inventbuild.studio
A moat allows the owner a degree of passivity. Eg, you own the desktop OS. You are already using this moat to get office software on every machine, while competitors either have to dance to your tune when publishing a program, or think of a way to get their own OS out there. You can see how the internet develops, knowing that you can get your own browser on every machine for free. You can watch for a bit before you move.
Relying on continuous inspiration is a treadmill that goes faster and faster. That's what's described here. Come up with something new and clever, someone copies it, come up with another thing. You can't be passive, you have to be moving constantly.
Inspiration and creativity used to be something society rewarded you for, since you could capture the value and build on top of it. That was the moat.
Now most people are punished for publishing because your work will usually get taken over by whoever has the biggest mouthpiece or compute, and there is no protection against that. I expect people to realize this sooner or later and take their work underground. It's already happening.
"Genuine creativity" for mundane web sites is a reason to close the page and buy from someone else. I'm tired of the overcomplication. The page jerking around as more crap is loaded. One minute page loads on mobile (looking at you, CNN).
All that has negative value if you just want to buy the thing. I just got done with an "instant quote" site that took 12 hours to respond for a request for a mattress install.
lite.cnn.com is their text only subdomain. Probably meant for accessibility, but since it's only text it loads quickly and is very pleasant to use.
Creative doesn't automatically equate to complex. For example, genuine creativity can be used to work within constraints like WCAG AAA compliant accessibility to build a usable, exciting website that works for everyone and yet still looks great.
Ling's Cars would like a word with you: https://museum.lingscars.com/
I'd bet my life conversions tanked with the new redesign last year after he retired.
Maybe the future of the web is bifurcation to headless for agents and fancy headful UI for humans.
Yes, what we want is "function over form" user-oriented design, but what we get is "form over function" user-manipulating design.
The implicit derision of the 2004 website screenshot in the article is telling: "Believe me, y’all, this was the HEIGHT of web design in 2004"
Compare that screenshot to the Nike website that the author calls "fine". The 2004 one has a wealth of information and functionality present on a single page, no scrolling or clicking required. The Nike one is just a fucking fullscreen ad with a menu bar.
The emperor has no clothes.
The fact that in the 1950s and 60s our best and brightest from around the world dreamt of working for jonas salk or joining the space program.
for the last 30 years that same level of talent was aggressively pursued to give us Google Adwords, complex insurance-backed financial products, a corporate culture of feckless cowards in leadership, the best of us never stop interviewing. literally an epidemic of dystopian psycho-afflications due to doomscrolling that threatens to devolve future generations thanks to weaponized dopamine manipulation, advertising so pervasive that it could bring down entire goverments (or companies, which are now bigger), or an entire adult generation of intelligent loners who may never own a house...
But AI, AI is what people are mad at?
After 25 years in systems engineering, I was in a state of ennui with technology. I had loved building computers, hacking systems, gaming with my friends so much as a child I built a career out of it.
I worked at a large technology firm where we had a product release bottleneck due to 1 UX engagement artist who's talents were so in-demand we had multiple products backed up because this person had to give birth to a journey that wow, REALLY engaged you
IF a site that sold books, Adwords, Facebook, Twitter toxic-celebrity culture, an infatuation with ourselves and our devices...what if the emperor really has no clothes? what if we are all really lame, lonely bullies to whom the accumulation of wealth comes a cost of empathic and emotional intelligence and a desire to be non-human...
IS THAT THE GOAL? What are we doing here? Creating Optimus Prime, Agent Smith, or Hedonism bot? Maybe all 3 of them fighting for the future? Sold, I'll take it. I fight for Hedonism bot.
nothing AI could do could make me more upset that what humanity has done to itself over the past 30 years. If you are a subject matter expert in technology, NOW is your time.
I just read that the use of dating apps has decreased considerably.
Scammers taking advantage of the weak is more difficult when Joe-luddite asks an advertisement-free AI and eschews wading through a pagerank advertising platform or asking their home amazon-wiretap scams to find the truth themselves - a truth that they can engage with that is somewhat advertising free (for now?)
If you are angry about AI, then go ahead and leave.
Star Trek turned 60, and most of the newer stuff was mediocre at best, still it persists, because people made it a part of their identity.
Star Wars, Doctor Who, Disney, The Kardashians, GTA, Harry Potter …
I think streaming services still have to realize that, their short lived „10 episodes and gone“ approach keeps people from getting invested.
Or trying to make a 90 year old man pretend he’s an action hero. And the egregious memberberries.
Or literally everything about that god awful academy one.
SNWs crime is doing the ridiculous episodes way too often. Pretty tolerable, by comparison.
I don't know about Astra, and have used Fable 5.1 only slightly (And burned 85% of my 5 hour quota in 1 prompt).
In my experience, LLMs are completely devoid of "thinking outside the box" capabilities. And I'm not talking about 6 thinking hats type of stuff, but slight of to the right field lateral thinking. Something a 6 year old does for fun when playing with their mates.
If this weren't so, we wouldn't have been through so many "<buzzword> engineering" in such a short amount of time.
The brainstorming thing, AI is really good at. "Gimme a bunch of 80s pop culture" is going to get you a longer list than you could think of yourself, and then you can just supply the judgement about what you want.
If anything, there are several _moats_ with Creativity (Big C) being one of them.
I still don’t think a tool has really replaced it as a visual coding tool.
The biggest problem is the Web has a dearth of good Flashy examples of people pouring their life into an experience, ever since the death of Flash. So web agents have no good training set for thinking creatively in this space.
What stands between them and that is the current crop of AI design tools and skills. lovable, emergent, frontend-design, Impeccable. They ship someone else's taste and hand you a 95% website. Good website, not your website.
These tools are nozzles. They shape the flow before it leaves your hand. If you want creativity unchecked, use the raw tool.
But yeah, it would be ironic if this was posted by AI and it misunderstood the convention.
Are there some places on Earth stuck in a time distortion field or a loop or something?
If you're painting an oil canvas it's by definition creative, but say programming even designed from scratch apps follow established patterns.
Actual flashes of genuine creativity in a consequential manner are rare there. Could you produce a flash like fast inverse root on demand? I sure can't
Now LLMs make a certain amount of genericity so easy it will become more repulsive than things which are full on bad taste to different sorts of people.
My gut feeling is the web world will experience something like the Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heta-uma fad where things which are bad are good because at least they are authentic.
At this point I believe that, ironically, writing (and other arts broadly) may be one of the last fields in which humans are truly permanently superior, because writing is ultimately an expression of humanity, and we built systems that are now exceeding that bar in a way that makes it hard for them to communicate back to "regular people". Feels flat, uncanny valley.
I wanted to mod a Casio watch with a custom crystal and screen that had not been done before. I needed a 3D model of the crystal for prototyping.
Claude was able to get the specs mostly correct, implement it in my Claude created custom 3D modeling program, and then I was able to understand the modification process with Gemini.
All of which would have taken me months to do before AI (or LLMs for the HN intelligentsia) existed. I was able to get the project done in a few days.
Creativity is also never purely original ideas, creativity is the continuation and connection of many different ideas already existing in the world. We don't think about how we might innovate on the printing press because these aren't things we think about or interact with much in our modern society.
AI + creativity is the new moat. Creative prompting is important, too. Everything is creativity, LLMs are tools just like Flash was.
Early programming in assembly mostly involved telling the computer how to do things that you want it to do. You instruct it in terms of the mechanical capabilities of the machine.
Compilers and interpreters came along and raised the layer of abstraction that programmers work on from the "how" domain to the "what" domain. Instead of saying how to move bits around to solve problems, we tell the computer what to do, and it would do it. Even languages like C in which programs seem like a description of how to compute something, they are more of a vague suggestion to the compiler, which will do what you told it to do, how it wants to do it.
Now in the era of agentic programming, the "what" isn't even the domain that programmers are operating in, it's "why". Why should we use these technologies? Why should certain architectural decisions be made to support future development? Why should protocols have or not have certain information in them? The relevant "what" questions are handled by the LLM, just like the "how" is handled by the compiler.
I really like using spec-driven development to capture the "why" as artifacts. I personally use the tool openspec, and I like it because it explicitly captures my reasoning in the documents it produces, but I'm sure there are other solutions. I also have a prompt that will generate a commit message for a change that captures "why" instead of "what", based on the conversation history. This is better than just describing what changed, because the diff already does that, and if you're looking at a commit to understand it, generally you'll be confused by the "why".
No matter how you do it, find some way to capture "why" as a material artifact. The "what" is the code that basically anyone can make now. Why will maintain your purpose.
The great news is that LLMs actually open this box back up. People with basic understanding of web can iteratively generate single-file HTML pages, AND LLMs are good for including accessibility guidelines, generating alt text, AND the source code is completely viewable.
In theory, this can actually usher in an even more creative time that the Flash days.
AI is no different.
Grass is green.
I tapped out.
Creativity is an entity's propensity to decrease entropy in a system by creating more order in structures (not necessarily "new").
Humans have a hard time understanding either; evolution of both genes and memes is so many orders beyond what a human brain can process. It's easier to invent religions than to grok reality.
> What the Gen-AI-enabled world needs now is better taste. It’s easy—trivial, even—to stand up a site or a basic app. But so what? Are you looking at the user experience from end to end? Are you questioning your own premises? Have you considered a completely, fundamentally different approach?
I think it's not just better taste that gets people to consider user experience end-to-end, or to question their own premises, or to try different approaches. It's effort. It's going in, using your app, considering how it will be used, and tweaking it (manually or through AI) until it's reached a standard you set. This process will also refine your taste and improve it - your taste is not something you're born with that sets your apart.
This process of repeated incremental effort and improvement is one that ultimately imbues the resulting work in your own style and creativity - not just the fact that you are a 'creative person'. Effort is still the moat. I struggle to explain this point as well as I want - I wrote about it a little here, but it's still messy in my head:
But it was novel because it was a new medium with (fairly) low cost of entry, which meant a lot of people could play with it. And the experimentation and play, and some of the kitschy garishness, defined that culture.
2020s culture does optimisation, not play. There are no rewards for experimentation and originality, no matter how fun it is.
You need a certain amount of wealth and free time to experiment and play, and the people who have those disapprove of everything which isn't about self-promotion and money. The people who don't, can't.
So that kind of creativity only happens on social media accounts with a couple of hundred followers, on a good day. It's not a collective interest, and it's certainly not marketable.
Which means creativity isn't a moat at all. People want what they want, and currently that the appetite for surprises and wonder is not high.
... 4 upvotes in 6 minutes - I wonder how many people got the obscure reference to The Standup talking about how the AI always generates a lighthouse milking a cloud when asked to generate wacky scenarios. (I don't know which AI)
You can make a Markov chain generate the phrase "imagine a lighthouse milking a cloud." That doesn't make the Markov chain creative. Creativity implies intent, which AI doesn't have. "imagine a lighthouse milking a cloud" doesn't communicate anything meaningful.
edit: I guess it was a reference to a thing I never saw.
Semantic arguments aren't interesting. Do you believe that creativity doesn't require intent, that intent doesn't exist in any meaningful sense, or that intent is only relevant if LLMs possess it? It's difficult for me to parse an actual rebuttal from your comment.
You're requiring me to first solve the hard problem of consciousness before making an argument you consider credible but I have yet to see a counterargument on your part which meets the same criteria, and you would need to do so to prove my statement is a "house of cards" versus simply an opinion with which you disagree.
I think yours is the more difficult argument. I can't really grasp a definition of art that doesn't presuppose intent.
And a parrot repeating words isn't creating art either, even if it repeats a haiku, any more than a Xerox machine copying a book is writing a novel. No one considers a parrot a poet. The person who wrote the haiku clearly intended to say something. Random words strung together which just happen to meet the syllable requirements aren't a haiku.
And believe it or not there was intent and even technique in Jackson Pollock's work. All of the modern and "postmodern" art that Hacker News likes to deride had something to say, and it expressed something unique about the artist and their cultural context and sometimes their relationship to the art movement itself. The "banana taped to a wall" was an intentional criticism of consumer culture. There was intent behind Duchamp's urinal (it was testing the boundaries of what the art community considered legitimate.) That intent is there even if you don't respect it because the work appears superficially simple. None of it was purely random or purely mechanistic.
If you told an AI to generate something in the style of Studio Ghibli it would copy the superficial elements of the technique but it would never spontaneously create Princess Mononoke because it doesn't have (nor can it comprehend) Hayao Miyazaki's views on environmentalism and industrialism, nor his experiences living in post WW2 Japan. What makes Ghibli movies art is not simply the aesthetic but the human element.
Not necessarily, no. Sometimes the most creative I've been has involved being totally aimless.
The only issue is that things work well all in the same way, and deficiencies are also shared.
Things will improve as creatives try far-out ideas outside of the local minima. But all those ideas will then be copied into the mono-thing.
At the end of the day, if this isn't about art, I don't see the issue. If your website exists to perform a function, I would rather it looks and acts like all of the other websites in the world.
* It is fun and energizing to hunt with friends but it is convenient to buy stuff from supermarket.
* It is fun to talk and share but convenient to browse tv/phone
* It is fun to walk and run but convenient to drive
Technologically slowly takes us away from the real world and into this abstract convenient world.
AI just accelerated it.
It's going to make for a lot of stuff, and a lot lot lot of it will be slop. It might be too exhausting to wade through. So there will be generative creativity to produce that mountain of new stuff, but then there's editorial capacity (taste?) that will be able to choose the meaningful results which should get further resources and development.
Both of these will be needed!
“But without effort he sets in motion all things by mind and thought."-Xenophanes
It always was far easier to train a creative thinker in how to operate the tools needed to facilitate their vision than it is to get a great tools operator to have good ideas.
Just like they made it possible for people to program in more than one language like people were pointing on the React Native post earlier today. We totally couldn't do that before!
No, the reality is that money, moolah, buckaroos, dollaridoos, greens, wealth, capital is increasingly becoming the only moat left.
creativity is you wandering the aisles of walmart, pushing your cart past shelves full of all kinds of devices.
I refer you to the footer.
(All time classic).