My current side project is a website for a preschool in San Francisco. I’m using AI to accelerate wherever it fits, but I’ve reserved the primary visual treatments to be made by hand. Partly because that’s the right call for a preschool brand. And partly because of a phrase Pablo Stanley coined for this: creativity osteoporosis.

I wrote about creativity osteoporosis a while back. The idea that your creative skills get weaker when AI does all the reps, like bones thinning when they’re not stressed. You don’t notice it happening. Everything seems fine. Then one day you reach for a skill and it’s… not there like it used to be

Stanley wrote this after a weekend of making pixel art by hand—a project called Pixabots, little 32x32 robot characters—as a deliberate detox. He describes what set off the detox:

The whole time I was drawing, there was this pull. Physical, almost. Like my body was telling me to open a tab and start prompting. Not because the work was bad. Not because I was stuck. Just because my brain has been trained, over the last two years, to route every creative problem through an LLM.

He still used AI for the parts that weren’t the art:

I used AI to build the Pixabots website. The stuff I’m not that good at… setting up Next.js, canvas rendering, exporting without antialiasing. And I tried to keep to myself the stuff that felt more “artistic” like the animation, the look and feel.

And then the operating principle:

The parts that feed my soul, I protected (even though everything in my body wanted to pull me away from them). The parts that would’ve killed the project with friction, I automated.

Maybe that’s the whole game now… knowing which parts to protect…

Knowing which parts to protect is becoming a judgment call I have to make on every project. The preschool site makes the decision easy: the visual language stays in my hands, AI handles the plumbing. The real work of this judgment is in the middle: projects where craft matters but throughput has merit, and every protect-or-automate call costs you something. If you don’t draw that line on purpose, it draws itself for you.