I must admit I’ve tried to read this essay by Frank Chimero—a script from a talk he recently gave—for about a week. I tried to skim it. I tried to fit it into a spare five minutes here and there. But this piece demands active reading. Not because it’s dense. But because it is great.

Chimero reflects on AI and his—and our—relationship to it. How is it being marketed? How do we think about it? How should we use it?

First off, Chimero starts with his conclusion. He believes we should reframe AI to be less like a tool or technology, and more like a musical instrument.

Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice. Instruments require a performance that relies on technique—the horn makes the sound, but how and what you blow into it matters; the drum machine keeps time and plays the samples, but what you sample and how you swing on top of it becomes your signature.

In other words, instruments can surprise you with what they offer, but they are not automatic. In the end, they require a touch. You use a tool, but you play an instrument. It’s a more expansive way of doing, and the doing of it all is important, because that’s where you develop the instincts for excellence. There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.

Then, he wanders off to give examples of four artists and their relationships with technology, stoking his audience—me, us, you—to consider “some more flexibility in how to collaborate with the machine in your own work, creative or otherwise.”

Read the whole piece. Curl up this mid-autumn Sunday afternoon with some hot tea and take the 20–25 minutes to read it and take it in.

Robin Sloan wrote a thought piece exploring what “extended thinking” and “reasoning” models actually mean.

…the models can only “think” by spooling out more text — while human thinking often does the oppo­site: retreats into silence, because it doesn’t have words yet to say what it wants to say.

That’s an interesting point Sloan makes. I believe there’s nuance though.

I’ve long felt that I do my best thinking by writing. When I work through a gnarly design problem, I’m writing first, then sketching, then maybe Figma-ing. But that could be after a walk, a shower, or doing the dishes.

I think the headline is a hard stance, but I appreciate the sentiment. All the best designers and creatives—including developers—I’ve ever worked with do things on the side. Or in Rohit Prakash’s words, they tinker. They’re always making something, learning along the way.

Prakash, writing in his blog:

Acquiring good taste comes through using various things, discarding the ones you don’t like and keeping the ones you do. if you never try various things, you will not acquire good taste.

It’s important for designers to see other designs and use other products—if you’re a software designer. It’s equally important to look up from Dribbble, Behance, Instagram, and even this blog and go experience something unrelated to design. Art, concerts, cooking. All of it gets synthesized through your POV and becomes your taste.

I will say that A-ha’s 1985 hit “Take On Me” and its accompanying video was incredibly influential on me as a kid. Listening to the struggles the band endured and the constant tuning of the song they did is very inspiring. In an episode of Song Exploder, Hrishikesh Hirway interviews Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, who originally wrote the bones of the song as a teenager, about the creative journey the band took to realize the version we know and love.

Hirway:

Okay, so you have spent the whole budget and then this version of the song comes out in 1984, and it flops. How were you able to convince anybody to give you another chance? Or maybe even more so, I’m curious, for your own sake: How were you able to feel like that wasn’t the end of the road for the song? Like, it had its chance, it didn’t happen, and that was that.

Waaktaar-Savoy:

Yeah, that’s the good thing about being young. You don’t feel, (chuckles) you know, you just sort of, brush it off your shoulders, you know. We were a hundred percent confident. We were like, there’s not a doubt in our minds.

…

…it took some time, you know, it was very touch and go. ‘Cause the, you know, they’ve spent this much money on the half-finished album. Are they gonna pour more money into it and risk losing more money? So, from Norway? Hey, no one comes from Norway and makes it. And so it was a risk for people.

Having gone to England from their native Norway, A-ha released two versions of the song in the UK before it became a hit in the US. With the help of the music video, of course.

A new record exec at the US arm of Warner Bros. took a liking to the band and the album, as Waaktaar-Savoy recalls:

And there was a new guy on the company, Jeff Ayeroff. He fell in love with the, the album and the song. And he had been keeping this one particular idea sort of in the back of his head. There was this art film called Commuter, with animation. So, he was the one who put together that with Steve Barron, who was the director.

And they made the video. And the song slowly climbed the charts to become a number one hit.

Noah Davis writing in Web Designer Depot, says aloud what I’d thought—but never wrote down—before AI, templates started to kill creativity in web design.

If you’re wondering why the web feels dead, lifeless, or like you’re stuck in a scrolling Groundhog Day of “hero image, tagline, three icons, CTA,” it’s not because AI hallucinated its way into the design department.

It’s because we templatified creativity into submission!

We used to design websites like we were crafting digital homes—custom woodwork, strange hallways, surprise color choices, even weird sound effects if you dared. Each one had quirks. A personality. A soul.

When I was coming up as a designer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one of my favorite projects was designing Pixar.com. The animation studio’s soul—and by extension the soul I’d imbue into the website—was story. The way this manifest was a linear approach to the site, similar to a slideshow, to tell the story of each of their films.

And as the web design industry grew, and everyone needed and wanted a website, from Fortune 500s to the local barber shop, access to well-designed websites was made possible via templates.

Let’s be real: clients aren’t asking for design anymore. They’re asking for “a site like this.” You know the one. It looks clean. It has animations. It scrolls smoothly. It’s “modern.” Which, in 2025, is just a euphemism for “I want what everyone else has so I don’t have to think.”

Templates didn’t just streamline web development. They rewired what people expect a website to be.

Why hire a designer when you can drop your brand colors into a no-code template, plug in some Lottie files, and call it a day? The end result isn’t bad. It’s worse than bad. It’s forgettable.

Davis ends his rant with a call to action: “If you want design to live, stop feeding the template machine. Build weird stuff. Ugly stuff. Confusing stuff. Human stuff.”