Be non-fungible

I don’t remember who this phrase, “be non-fungible”, was attributed to, but I think it was on an episode of Lenny’s Podcast with Marc Andreessen, and it was referenced during a conversation about how AI is reshaping roles, enhancing the best people even more than the average person, blah blah blah.

But it struck me like a lightning bolt when I heard it. I’ve rallied against senior leaders thinking of junior roles and people as fungible—whether talking about staffing particular engineers on a team, or even the broader world of generalists in consulting. It always rubbed me the wrong way—but to an unreasonable degree. Like, my reactions in those scenarios probably held me back from developing better relationships with those leaders. I think it was because I knew I was always doing more and different things than the next designer, so I was special, I wasn’t fungible.

This simple phrase, when used as a way of looking at myself or presenting myself, was novel to me. Or at least, something I’d never tried explicitly articulating like that. And I fell in love with it, because I’ve struggled to position myself when looking for a job, or asking for a promotion—or even introducing myself to a new team. I think it is because I feel the assumptions that others make about designers in whatever room I am in. I know most people haven’t worked with great designers, and I expect that I’m going to be a change of pace for them. Not just “better”, but very different in several ways that come from experience and training. But that doesn’t lend itself to a pithy headline on natebishop.com, does it?

Not sure what I’ll do with this lovely phrase, but pretty soon you’ll see my narrative on the homepage shift to include “non-fungible”.

Ideas multiplied by execution

I can’t believe I have never come across this brilliant nugget from Derek Sivers:

Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

I love this as an equation. Beautiful.

The hard part

Nick Scialli puts very nicely something that non-technical folks don’t often say (or understand?) when extolling the virtue of general purpose LLM use cases on the topic of “replacing” roles like developers when it comes to code generation:

Impressive! But here’s the problem: generating code was never the hard part.

The value I bring to my job is not generating code. I mean, I suppose that is a part of it in the end, but my value is largely in the work that happens before I generate the code: things like requirements clarification, negotiation, technical design, and tradeoff analysis.

He goes on to outline how the model should have A) asked clarifying questions to better tailor the output to the requirements and B) essentially used abstraction laddering to ensure that the function was even needed.

He’s right, but also: the model (ChatGPT in this case) can and probably already does do those things if told to or asked to. What will be more important is knowing how to work well with these capabilities to allow someone like Scialli to spend more quality time doing the valuable things he outlines. That part has probably been talked about ad nauseam.

To strengthen the case for the role being much more than code generation, he points out that the task of clarifying requirements of a request and determining if the initial request is correct needs to be done “on a much, much larger scale,” as he puts it. That point is starting to get at the corollary from the “how to work well” point I made above: when to work with models and agents. Because we’re still a ways off from those models being good at what Steve Jobs described:

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

That’s the broader value that Scialli is getting at. Productivity tools are not replacements, but—while impressive, revolutionary, and largely mind-blowing—still very primitive tools.

Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?”

Isaac Asimov on the circumstances of creativity from 1959:

It seems to me then that the purpose of cerebration sessions is not to think up new ideas but to educate the participants in facts and fact-combinations, in theories and vagrant thoughts.

His term “cerebration sessions” is a wonderful 1950's term. I might steal that.

And the concept of giving participants “sinecure” tasks to do for payment—making the creativity a less important task—is genius. Getting paid to "think" is probably more common now than back then, but it's still a difficult sell.