Where's the Work?

Just a quick mind-spew as I walk to the train station.

This morning I saw — or was alerted to — a comment^[1] by a friend on LinkedIn. That comment was on a post from someone talking about the tool Spotify uses to do all their coding now. I’d heard bits and pieces about how they’ve been vibe coding for close to a year now. It’s a badge of honour. There’s pride behind it. We’re doing it this way. Look at us!

The post itself was actually just showing the tool and talking about how glorious it is — agents and such. My friend’s comment was: “Tools are great, but where’s the work?” It’s a simple comment, but it sums up almost everything I see about AI, particularly recently.

There are so many custom tools and apps and flows I can’t keep up. It is interesting to me, in a strangely passive way. Recently I’ve felt so much of this just washing over me and away. The cycle of shiny things being held up to the light then promptly forgotten is getting shorter and shorter. Toolslop? Maybe. I selected Jurassic Park as a holiday read recently and I feel like paraphrasing one of the more famous quotes, “Your designers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” We’re working it out. I get the thrill of creating something from scratch and improving your workflow, I looooove efficiency, but it’s almost like people hyping macros and actions from yesteryear.

I hear people talking about how they don’t use Figma anymore^[2], how they’ve built their own tools and are now working a hundred times faster — which I’m sure is hyperbole for hyperbole’s sake (but legit interesting). But again, this is the crux of what AI conversation has become: the tools. Getting things done. And it’s great for that. But there is still so much noise. I’m so bored of tools. I don’t know when this will end. It feels like it’s circling the drain a bit — just a relentless volume of content and noise around tooling — which brings me back to my friend’s original comment.

There was another comment on that post that went something like: “Does this explain why Spotify is incredibly painful to use now?” — which also struck a chord. The past couple of months I’ve really struggled with the app. Search just doesn’t work. I wait forever for playlists to load. Trying to find music I like, artist radio, song radio — it’s become an absolute nightmare. I tried everything: deleting the app, clearing all my Spotify data. Nothing helped. Admittedly I thought, “My phone’s three years old, maybe it’s time” — but could it be that the code just isn’t very good? That’s me looking for a reason, I know. That’s me looking for a neatly packaged excuse to point the finger and say, look what AI has done.^[3]

Tools are great. Honestly, I love them. There are things I could never build without AI. But where’s the work? What are the tools being used to make? That’s what I’d like to see more of. That’s the direction I’d like things to go. Where is the AI-assisted design that has real application? Maybe it’s just so incredibly unsexy that no one wants to show it? Is it just the case of, as suspected, new tools making things a bit faster, a different way of working? Outputs are largely the same, there’s just more of them in a shorter period of time (which is no bad thing in most of the cases I’ve seen).

I’m off to continue my trial with YouTube Music.