
Copy, marketing and social for @sketch + @elyxdesign. Also: dad, husband, fussy coffee enthusiast, occasional runner.
UK
Joined February 2009
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Freddie Harrison retweeted
An important skill in the AI era, next to knowing what to build, is knowing what to consume.
AI tools are so powerful that you can absorb ideas and insights from more people than ever before.
Knowing who is worth listening to is a very valuable skill these days.
No doubt Hector is incredibly talented, but the most interesting thing for me about the discourse with founders saying “they can’t find anyone like him” is that this work, and getting these results, requires trust, cash investment and time in the hire(s) responsible for it.
I think the majority of founders who look at this in awe and complain that it’s impossible to find aren’t willing to commit that.
There’s a rare breed of unpaid ads in the wild and if you can capture them you’re the one everyone in SF wants to hire right now.
Wrote about how if you’re marketing a product in 2026, you need to swallow your ego and get out of the way. Your marketing is not the story and it never was.
Or…how I was a weird kid that stared at shopfronts!
freddiewrit.es/journal/2026/…
Unsurprisingly this applies as much to writing with AI as it does to coding or designing or any other output.
The writing output of every model is bang average at best. Treat it is as a rough slab of marble that still needs chiselling to turn into something interesting.
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?
The attention economy is dead! Long live the inattention economy!
(Or not because it’s pretty terrible and our brains are all slowly turning to gloop)
freddiewrit.es/journal/2026/…
Other things MCP stands for:
- Maybe Connect Pi?
- More Clients? Please 🙄
- More Cash Please!
- Money Can Persuade
TIL that people argue about Monzo vs Revolut the same way people argue about design tools and the need for us all to touch grass has never been greater.
















