What Is Worth Building

AI has made me more excited to build things and more uneasy about the reasons people give for building them.

The ability itself is incredible. You can take an idea that would once have required skills you didn't have, or a team you couldn't afford, and start working on it. The distance between imagining something and trying it has become smaller. I want to make use of that. I also keep wondering why so much of the advice about it ends with making money and getting out.

Build an AI company. Make a few million dollars. Exit. I understand the appeal. What I don't understand is why this is so often presented as a complete answer to what someone should do with their life.

It leaves out the part I care about most: what is the company for?

Suppose I make an app in a week. That's impressive compared with needing a year to make it. But the shorter timeline tells me very little about whether anyone needs the app. I might have solved a problem faster. I might also have made it easier to avoid asking whether there was a problem in the first place.

The excitement around the tools can hide this distinction. Making something work gives you a clear result. Deciding whether it's worth making is harder to demonstrate. There is no equally satisfying moment when the screen lights up and tells you that you've chosen a useful goal.

This is where I think curiosity matters. You have to notice something beyond the tool itself: a difficulty someone has, a process that doesn't make sense, something you want to understand badly enough to keep working on it. A powerful tool can help you investigate. It cannot make you care about the result.

But I am less convinced that curiosity is enough by itself. I can be idealistic about the work I want to do and still need to be practical about getting it done. An idea has to survive contact with limited time, money, and other people. Caring about it doesn't remove those conditions.

Right now, I keep coming back to three things: curiosity, being street smart, and diplomacy. Curiosity helps me find something worth investigating. Being street smart helps me deal with the situation I am actually in. Diplomacy matters when getting anything done involves people who have their own priorities. I want to understand how those abilities work together.

My working theory is that people can have different mixtures of them. Someone who is weaker at navigating situations or dealing with people might need extraordinary curiosity to keep making progress. If two of those dimensions are weak, the third may have to be unusually strong. Someone else might have two or all three working together. I can imagine strength in one area making up for some weakness in another.

Diplomacy still needs boundaries. I don't want to become so good at adapting to a situation that I lose my sense of who I am. I also have to consider who else pays for a decision that benefits me. Getting a result would not settle whether the compromises were worth it.

This adds another question to the one I started with. Once I think something is worth doing, how do I give it a chance to exist? I want to keep the curiosity that made me care about it and develop the practical judgment to carry it through. It is possible to take the purpose seriously and take the constraints seriously too.

These practical questions still don't make profit my only measure of the work. A failed attempt can teach me something valuable. If I tried to solve something difficult and discovered why my approach didn't work, I would have learned something I could use in another attempt. What bothers me is the assumption that the financial outcome will tell me everything I need to know about whether the work mattered.

Money matters. A project that can't support itself may not last, and building a useful business is a real achievement. But when I imagine making a lot of money, I still have another question. What did I contribute? I don't expect the bank balance to answer that for me.

There is another pressure that makes this harder. Almost every conversation about AI seems to come with a deadline. Get in now. Learn this now. Build before the opportunity disappears. Even when the advice is well meant, the result is a feeling that stopping to think is itself a mistake.

I feel that urgency. I want to move quickly. Yet the same speed that makes an opportunity exciting makes me question confident claims about how long it will last. A product can be new today and ordinary soon afterward. A plan that depends on a temporary advantage needs more thought than the promise of easy money usually gives it.

That uncertainty doesn't persuade me to sit everything out. It makes me want a reason to work that can survive a change in the tools. If I care about a problem, I can reconsider how to solve it. If the entire attraction was that a new tool let me produce something quickly, it's harder to know what I'm committed to when everyone else can do the same.

The darker possibility is that we become extremely productive at pursuing goals we've accepted without examining them. We could fill the world with more products and more information while becoming less sure of what deserves our attention. I don't need to predict a collapse to find that possibility disturbing. It would already be a loss to spend years working intensely on things I never really chose.

I want to build something that changes the world in a substantial way. That is a large ambition, and I haven't yet found the particular work that would give it substance. Wanting to change the world doesn't tell me what to do on Monday morning.

These journals give me a smaller example of work I already find worthwhile. They help me see where I stand, even when different opinions and worldviews are still colliding in my head. Someone reading them can get to know a little of how I think. But the process would still matter to me with a small audience, because I am trying to understand my own mind as well as make something for other people.

That doesn't settle my larger ambition. It does give me something concrete to put beside it: work whose value I can describe without starting with its reach or its price. I want to understand what makes the work in front of me worth doing, and what I need to learn to carry it through.

If I can make things that once seemed beyond my reach, what is worth reaching for? And once I choose, how do I become capable of doing it?