When AI can do everything else, your job is to make it good

If you're not here for the quality, why are you here at all?

Sep 05, 2025

AI isn’t coming for your job. But it might be coming for your excuses.

The old creative triangle said that you could have two out of three - good, fast, or cheap. And AI is breaking that model.

Fast will be free, and cheap will be everywhere.

So there’s only one thing left.

Good.

I don’t think you should take that as a threat. It’s an opportunity.

The real concern isn’t AI replacing you, it’s AI lowering the bar

People are worried about the idea of AI making the role of the human redundant. At least in enough cases to really threaten people’s jobs. AI will flood the market with “good enough” content.

More recently, we’ve seen MIT’s research that suggests a much more grounded reality. AI output isn’t as good as we think. It struggles with context, nuance, depth, and originality.

So the problem isn’t about AI taking over…except if we start treating AI output as final. It’s a first draft. Maybe a second draft too. We can use AI to refine up to a certain point.

But at the point at which AI stops, some things are still interchangeable.

And that’s where the human touch comes in. Because if you can take what AI produces, build on it, refine it, and elevate it, then you can make yourself irreplaceable.

The edge isn’t on speed, it’s on standards

AI can give you superhuman speed. A genuine game change in how fast you can do things.

Which means you can:

Try five different approaches instead of just one
Rework the copy a few more times instead of settling
Make the design more polished instead of rushing to ship a placeholder
Actually circle back to improve things, instead of just hoping to

It’s freeing you up to do what we always wanted to do, but never had time for. Make the thing better.

But it does come with a catch. You need to raise your standards, otherwise the speed doesn’t matter. You’ll be shipping mediocre work, faster, and so will everyone else.

Creation is the core skill

The workflow of design, product, and development is going to focus on creation and imagination. Not about the precision of “measure twice, cut once”. It’s about making something real, seeing what happens, and making it better.

AI enables the genuine, productive, positive evolution of “fail fast”. I always hated that term, all it suggests to me is a reckless lack of care. But now we can take the recklessness away, and enable ourselves to learn by doing.

You can test, tweak, rework and reinvent. And we don’t have to wait for a perfect brief, or exactly the right conditions, or all the resources and headcount to be assigned (or not).

When creativity becomes faster then it also frees you. Teams that lean into that, that start to treat creation as iterative, daily, punk-like rebel act of making, they’re going to be outpacing the ones who wait to get everything right before they start work.

AI doesn’t replace you, it removes constraints

So that’s why I think where we’re going is empowering. Probably just at the time when we’re in the dip of negative commentary about the capabilities of AI! I’m excited about being less bound by the limits of time or resource. Isn’t the most exciting part of making things the initial act of creation? The exploration, iteration…the play.

My pitch is the opposite of “AI will take my job”. I think we might start to realize that AI gives us a chance to be better at our job then we ever were before.

And that means the opportunity for real differentiation is right in front of you. If everyone can move fast and spend less, then you’re able to make an active, intentional choice.

Will you be excellent?

If you do choose to do that, consistently and deliberately, then you’ll be helping to define a next era of creativity.

Robin Cannon | Stories and Signals