Good ideas come from disagreement
Why generative AI can't beat generative friction
Someone once referred to it as a noisy mind. I used to say it was like a radio I can’t switch off. Some people are constantly thinking about the conversations they have, the questions they’ve been asked, the help that’s been requested. The building blocks tumble around in their heads, assembling different shapes, thinking about the possible futures they could have, the forms they could take.
When people come to me with problems, I often hear myself saying “You know, I was thinking about this...” At one point, some of the engineers I was working with started making fun of me for it.
It’s not that I’m a know-it-all (I hope!). It’s more that I keep the fragments of conversations and the things-we-should do next rattling around in my head. I don’t look to build beautiful long-term solutions without others. I’m not trying to invent the future on my own. I am constantly playing with Lego in my head, trying to understand what we could make with the blocks I see lying around.
I like to test and prototype ideas, looking for feedback on half-baked theories quickly. The availability of generative AI as a thought partner and collaborator should be amazing for people like me, and in many ways it is. When you sit bolt upright at 5 a.m. because a potential idea or solution has popped into your head, how cool is it to be able to not only jot it down, but quickly iterate on it, and have some conversation about the idea with a willing partner?
There’s huge excitement among leadership about the changing face and pace of collaboration. Rather than having engineers and product people work together, AI can now be used to rapidly prototype. Agentic AI is coming to take over entire workflows. The future belongs to one-person startups who can change the world with nothing more than an idea and a $20 per month Claude subscription. Or so the pitch goes.
There’s no question that prototyping is unrecognisable from a year ago. AI enables us to get to a higher fidelity faster than ever before. The technology is improving all the time and the promise is that implementing software all the way to production will eventually become frictionless.
There’s only one problem with this narrative. AI doesn’t tell you when your idea is terrible.
Rapid iteration only works if you’re building on a strong foundation. AI can help you build faster, but it won’t tell you if you’re building the wrong thing. Your 5 a.m. ideas will always be warmly received, however poorly-formed they might be in reality.
You could be on a fast-track to mediocrity, clarifying your thinking, but not getting any push back or challenges to your premise. AI is wonderful at helping you develop your idea, but it’s terrible at disagreeing with it.
Some LLMs are more sycophantic than others, but generally, responses are primed to be positive rather than adversarial. You can miss out on the leaps that come from debates and disagreement from people with different perspectives.
Without that early friction, ideas that should be forged on the anvil of debate instead get built to high fidelity before being exposed to any real challenge. By then, you’ve invested time, effort, and ego. The sunk cost makes pivoting harder. You’re at risk of creating something beautiful that won’t survive contact with the world.
Rather than embracing AI as a co-creator, it seems many people have given up thinking and outsourced the creative act, losing their voices in the process. The phrase AI slop has passed into common parlance to describe the generic AI-generated articles that have started to appear everywhere, from social media to entertainment sites.
Good ideas become great products and implementation through the push-pull of debate, and the friction of trade-offs. You can share a 5 a.m. moment of inspiration with AI, but you can’t expect it to generate one itself. An AI is never going to laugh at you for playing with Lego, and sometimes you need that.
The efficiency gains we will make with AI are already astonishing and will accelerate. There’s going to be unimaginable change as work gets automated and orchestrated by machines in ways we never thought possible. But I think the spark of innovation remains innately human. Share your Lego with people with different perspectives.