Effortless Technology

Brad and I recorded a follow-up to Inspiration, Move Me Brightly, the podcast episode we recorded a few weeks ago.

I thought we were going to talk about AI tools.

Within minutes, we were talking about music (again).

Classic Brad-and-Jem move.

I watched it back and kept thinking: oh, right, this is not really a video about which AI app to use.

It is about the weird beginner feeling.

The weird beginner feeling

A lot of experienced designers and developers came up through an era where craft meant mastering specific tools, roles, and rituals.

Figma & React. Sketch & Backbone before that. Photoshop & jQuery before that. Production rituals. File handoffs and red-lines. Calendars, todo lists, portfolio, and professional identities that slowly congealed around the shape of a toolchain.

The ground has moved under our feet before, just maybe not as much as it has done lately.

It is easy to make that feeling sound abstract, but it is not abstract when it is happening in your body.

It feels like “wait, am I behind?”

Or “did the industry move on while I was making coffee?”

It feels like being good at something and suddenly needing to learn how to be good at a different thing.

Jumping from a plane and watching a YouTube tutorial for the parachute.

I took several years away from my tech career to focus on music and other side quests. When I came back, I had to rebuild my intuition for where things were going. It wasn't just professional development or upskilling: it was emotional and identity-level.

What does it mean to be the person in the room who has always skated to where the puck is going to be if you lose your intuition for the shape of the game?

What does it mean to specialize in prototyping ideas really quickly when that becomes table stakes for everyone with a computer?

This is why I get frustrated when AI education turns into tool worship.

Tools can be hawked, and workflows can be taught.

The useful work is quieter and weirder.

How do you approach a new material without flinching?

How do you ease into a jam session when you don't have the chord charts and have to trust your ear?

How do you keep enough self-trust to play before you understand?

Playing Music™, not one song or one instrument. Letting it flow through you. Playing Technology, not just a set of tools or one workflow.

I started learning guitar before YouTube existed. We had just had tablatures sent around as .txt files: plaintext streams of numbers. Put your finger here, then here, then here. If you want to play this song, memorize these numbers.

It sort of works. You can get through the song and play Master of Puppets or Under the Bridge recognizably enough for your middle school friends to nod along.

But learning the song is not the same as understanding the fretboard.

It is not the same as hearing the relationship between the notes. It is not the same as feeling the instrument as something alive in your hands. It is definitely not the same as getting to the point where you can stop thinking about your fingers and start listening.

That is the AI tool conversation I keep trying to have.

The surface question is: what prompt do I type?

The deeper question is: what do I hear?

Yes, learn the instrument. Learn the tool. Learn the interface. Learn what happens when you push here and pull there. Then keep going.

Learn Music™, not an instrument.

For creative technologists right now, that means learning the substrate underneath whatever app is glowing in the group chat this week.

The tools matter. Guitars matter. Pedals matter. Amps matter. The exact way a piano throws hammers at strings matters. But the tool is not the whole practice.

The practice is taste. Feel. Timing. Listening. Knowing when to lead and when to follow. Knowing when the shiny new thing is trying to smuggle someone else's workflow into your nervous system.

The signal is play

The moments when technology has felt most alive to me have never been the clean, professional ones. They were the messy ones.

Throwing back to the feeling of computing in the 90s. FrontPage Express. Kai's Power Tools. Microsoft 3D Movie Maker. The Games Factory. I was too young to know what Software Engineering™ was; I just had toys to make things with.

Brad and I talked about that feeling in the video: the moment when technology feels open.

I want more of that. Not nostalgia, exactly. More like: can we recover the part of the computer that made us want to text our friends at midnight because we made something cool?

I don't mean play as a soft little garnish on top of serious work, or something sandboxed to quarterly hackathons. I mean play as foundation. Play is how you find the grain of a new material. You poke at it. You listen back. You build enough private evidence to trust your own taste again.

This is also where commercially useful things come from.

No more priests

Another word I kept circling in the conversation was depedestalization.

Depedestalize the tools. Depedestalize the personalities. Depedestalize the whole weird parasocial machine around people who happened to find a workflow three Wednesdays before someone else.

I say this as someone who has been parasocially pedestalized before in ways that have felt uncomfortable. The internet is strange.

AI makes this worse because the discourse wants priests.

Tool priests. Founder priests. Prompt priests. Power-user priests. A whole row of people standing at the front of the room with a perfectly lit desktop and a new commandment.

That is not the room I want to build. The room I want is closer to a communal jam session.

People bring what they know. People bring what they are scared of. People bring half-formed riffs. Someone has a pedal nobody else has tried. Someone else has been playing the same three chords for twenty years and suddenly hears them differently.

Nobody is the Rolling Stones in this version.

Thank god.

What role are you playing?

The standard AI question is where the human belongs in the loop.

I understand why that language exists. It is useful enough in diagrams. It gives people a way to talk about responsibility and control. But it is also kind of sterile.

The more musical question is: what role are you playing right now?

Are you seeding?

Editing?

Holding rhythm? Playing the downbeat or the accent? Filling in the gaps?

Playing like Bobby, or playing like Jerry?

Maybe you're producing from the booth?

Letting the model reflect the room back at you because the room has been moving faster than your nervous system can summarize?

That last one is not theoretical for me. In the video, Brad and I fed the conversation back through the machine while we were still in it.

This could sound like the most insufferable AI-person sentence of all time, but it helped. It reflected a shape we could not quite see yet. Not because the model was the genius in the room. Just that the sounding board, the arrangement, helped the thinking become visible.

That distinction feels important.

Sometimes I want the model to take a million seeds and cross-pollinate them. Other times I want a mirror. Or a better question. Or a little alien object dropped on the table so Brad and I can point at it and go, wait, yes, that.

Sometimes I know exactly what I want, and the correct instruction is: do not deviate.

The role changes with the project. It changes with the medium. It changes with the moment.

That is musicianship. That is technology artistry.

Ensemble intelligence

The last phrase I keep returning to did not arrive fully formed from either of us.

Near the end of the conversation, we asked 5.5 to put something on the table that we had not considered yet. It gave us a frame: ensemble intelligence.

Human versus AI is the boring frame. Figma versus Claude is a product debate. One tool to rule them all is fantasy-novel brain applied to software.

The frame that still feels alive is ensemble: a room where listening matters.

The intelligence is not trapped inside any one model or person. It is not trapped inside an artifact or a tool.

The arrangement was doing the work. Brad and I were talking while the transcript accumulated. 5.5 arrived late with a phrase we could use. The not-yet-course hovered in the background.

The conversation ends on a line I have not been able to shake:

"The work is in the ensemble."

That feels like the whole thing.

Maybe what we are putting together is not an AI course, exactly. Maybe it is a school for ensemble creativity: a place to practice moving with these tools without handing them your agency, and a place to recover the beginner feeling while learning the instrument, not the song.

And then, eventually, to learn Music.