Is it Slop or is it Craft

Friction as a Feature by Emil Kowalski (great piece as usual) made me think. What happens to craft when the barrier to entry is removed. How can we make products stand out in an era of fast-fashion software.

Life becomes great again when you realize this has all happened before and it’s just the circle of life. New tech comes in and makes the old ways obsolete, creating abundance in the process.

Going all the way back to the early 1500s, the printing press caused the original ‘content slop’ panic. It let more ideas and voices be published, while the scholars complained about worthless material filling the world.

Digital photography brought the cost of another attempt close to zero. It did not kill professional photography, it moved the selection from before production to after production.

A more recent example is website builders and templates. They allow non-specialists produce work that once required a professional team before. Tools like Webflow and Framer let designers ship websites without writing a line of code.

It is true that these tools made many outcomes feel less special and distinctive. At the same time, recognizable excellence still happens beyond the baseline.

Now, do we actually want to remove friction? Let’s look at these three neat concepts:

Generative friction - producing the first draft. AI is excellent at it and let’s be honest, we always wanted this. Think countless templates, libraries and boilerplates.

Formative friction - developing judgment while building. Struggling with constraints, looking for alternatives, learning systems, receiving critique, revising and crafting the details. This is something AI can assist us with, and something we want to preserve. Use AI to learn, not bypass it.

Shipping friction - putting something into the world. Making something actually useful, understanding users, tradeoffs, edge cases, maintaining it. Tools can help, but the responsibility cannot be outsourced.

The old world of friction and gatekeeping did not guarantee craft. Just remember bad enterprise software, broken websites, or expensive products protected not by excellence but distribution. Lowering barriers admits people with strong ideas who previously lacked money, credentials, time, or geography.

My bet is that AI is not killing craft.

It removes the friction of producing an artifact. It makes it easier to avoid obviously bad work, but it does not automatically make it unusually good. It moves the bottleneck from execution to judgment, taste, and original ideas.

It lets creators and builders spend less time operating tools and rebuilding defaults, and more time crafting the details and working on what matters.

Abundance is noisy, but it makes craft, curation, taste, trust, and distribution even more valuable.

Net positive imo.