This was a solid piece. It reminded me a lot of how fragile the 'creative loop' can actually be. My mother, who was in the nineties an ink-and-pencil graphic

This was a solid piece. It reminded me a lot of how fragile the 'creative loop' can actually be. My mother, who was in the nineties an ink-and-pencil graphic designer and cartoonist, was also a back-to-the-lander with a strong anti-technology streak. When she wasn't doodling, she was working on an enormous treadle loom in our basement. Here heroes were Quakers, Amish, and Hudderite artisans, and we lived deep in the countryside. When her employer mandated Adobe Illustrator, she quit. Being forced to use a machine that she hated on principle destroyed the pleasure that she had in her existing mastery of her light table, her compass, her letraset, etc. I was already a coder back then, and so of course, I had great teenage disdain for her ludditism. Yet as I get older, I can see her point, which I take to be friendly to the author of this piece. Namely, that what you do in pursuit of a creative career can obviate the point of pursuing a creative career, which, presumably, is to trade income and stability off against the satisfaction of self-expression. For AI reasons, I've been thinking about her predicament a lot again lately. GH Copilot, which I admire as a breakthrough achievement, nevertheless makes me feel uneasy, as though the thoughts are having themselves. Copilot makes me faster, but it also breaks the immersion, knocking me out of the coding flow-state that I experience as fundamental not only to my pre-copilot productivity, but my enjoyment of my job. Sure, choosing an appropriate variable name or building a simple GraphQL resolver might be rote work, but it was enjoyable rote work, like knitting. The market is beginning to put me in tension with my own career, as my mother experienced, and as the author of this piece also seems to experience. It wouldn't take much for some future iteration of Copilot to suck the marrow from my own coding practice, leaving me perpetually reviewing code rather than writing it. And where would that leave me? Certainly not in flow. And if I'm not in flow, why not just go into management, and have done? For different reasons, the author of this essay is experiencing a similar marrow-suck. It's not AI this time (or rather, for now,) but rather the banality of chasing the market. It sounds like there is something about the experience of data-informed creatorship that is draining, and drains you in proportion to the degree you adopt it. Three different causes, same effect: the 'fecund homeostasis' of the creative loop is broken by changing market conditions, for reasons idiosyncratic to each of the three situations. Financial success is thrown into tension with self-satisfaction. The market giveth, the market taketh away.