Creativity is the New Moat

"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.

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.

The emperor has no clothes.

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 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.

I still don’t think a tool has really replaced it as a visual coding tool.

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.

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.

... 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)

> 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:

https://luke.zip/posts/draw-the-owl/

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.

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!

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.