“AI is the closest thing in the world to a genie lamp,” writes Alberto Romero in the Algorithmic Bridge newsletter. His point: while the “magic” might be remarkable, it shifts the effort to the wish. When AI can manifest what you ask on demand, the hard part becomes naming what you actually want. Alas, most people (and organizations) aren’t very good at that part.
The idea of thinking about “single-use” magical objects is that they invert the effort allocation 100%: the “how” is fully outsourced. How does the genie get you a billion dollars? How does it make you extremely handsome? You don’t care, you don’t want to know. So, you automatically realize that your mental effort must now be fully devoted to the complementary question: what do you want? …
The belief that doing takes more resources than deciding what to do has been the default operating mode for basically all of human life. The how has always been so expensive that the what barely matters. You didn’t need to be good at wishing because you were never going to get most of what you wished for anyway.
So now you can get what you wished for (in software and software-shaped problems, at least). As that capability becomes more equally absorbed, the differentiator won’t be speed or execution but knowing what to make in the first place. Romero points out that sometimes people call this critical POV by a number of different names: taste, judgment, decision-making, agency, curiosity, or imagination. “For a while, I thought these were all the same thing in various disguises,” he writes. “But I think they’re actually different skills that all became load-bearing at once.”
All these skills share a family resemblance—they’re all “what” skills rather than “how” skills—but they’re not interchangeable. Someone can have extraordinary taste and zero agency (the critic who never creates). Someone can have strong agency and terrible judgment (the founder who moves fast toward the wrong thing). Someone can have all the curiosity in the world and zero agency (the vibe-coder who is handling 10 projects at once but none of them will have any impact in the world). Etc.
All these skills are also well-known to those who have dedicated time to thinking about these matters, but for the rest of us, they were all invisible before because the “how” bottleneck was sitting in front of them like a boulder blocking a cave entrance. Now the boulder is rolling away and it turns out there’s an entire stack of capacities behind it that most people never developed because they never had to.
When you suddenly have the ability to do anything—and fast—then the critical skill becomes knowing what to build. And those people Romero mentions, the ones with “dedicated time to thinking about these matters”? Those people are called designers. The best designers have the skill to learn the outcomes that people truly need… and from there, work through the frictions blocking those outcomes to finally understand the deep, twisty heart of the problem. Naming the outcome and the problem is how you begin to work toward a solution—the what, not the how.
AI is just a technology. It’s a strange and powerful one, but in the end it’s an implementation detail (so is the genie and its lamp). We’ve got a new and burgeoning ability to make our ideas real, and a whole set of newly possible shapes those ideas can take. What shall we do with that? The genie can grant the wish, but it can’t tell you what to wish for. That’s always been the designer’s job.
