25 Fields Medalists reflected last week “[we all need] to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place.” Their public statement calls out the important connection between a groups goal, and the group itself. It is a caution that we must not destroy the social fabric that clothes us. What we do to that fabric, we do to ourselves.
Slowly make haste, and without losing courage;
Twenty times redo your work;
Polish and re-polish endlessly,
And sometimes add, but often take away
Nicolas Boileau
AI is having a profound impact on my creative process, as an artist, as an engineer, and as a business owner. Generative AI can remove some of the pain from making new things. What is the price we pay for it's help? Does it really make us faster to use AI to create something, or do we spend the same time, but in a different way? I've often heard people use different versions of "Go slow to go fast". It's embedded in ancient stories like the tortoise and the hair, carved in Greek letters on ancient buildings. Festina lente. σπεῦδε βραδέως. Make Haste Slowly.
The current hiring process is a good example of the AI Arms Race that Cory Doctorow was writing about recently. https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/10/deep-state-wopr/#abelard-... - It's also a good example of a multi-polar trap. The rules of the current game assure everyone looses.
One thing I just don’t get is why these obvious conclusions don’t occur to the people who decided to use AI tools for hiring. They must understand all of this, but it benefits them, so they just go for the short-term gains. It feels like people aren’t planning to learn or develop any further at all.
A recent tragedy is the shuttering of the airplanes.live API. They've recently been bombarded with crazy amounts of traffic from people vibe coding apps, and violating the TOS and using it commercially.
On top of that, after shuttering it to people not feeding data to the system, they were bombarded by LLM written emails, all nearly identical, and all formulaic. It's really sad - but they chuck them right in the bin.
That is a travesty. I can't help but hope we can find ways to protect projects like this in a way that doesn't require government or corporate regulation. Others have mentioned a Web of Trust / Social Credit - if we could wire that into the the http protocol ...
AI use in the creation of this article is inconsequential. There is obvious joy and high fidelity information here. Perhaps some vibe coding made the animations easier to develop, and made it possible to produce this in reasonable time. Who cares. Love of craft is evident. What more proof do you need that this is worthy of human attention?
