“I feel proud of doing it all myself”.

My 12-year-old son is setting up a business selling vases, plant pots and homewares at a local market. While I’m poring over my margin tracker spreadsheet, he’s in the background yammering away about price points, costs and doing market research.

His first efforts on his 3D printer were making fun objects and toys using others’ designs.  These are copyrighted, so he can’t use these designs commercially. And he’s determined to do things properly. I do wish as a parent that I had the authority of the law in my own home, but there we go.

So then – as an AI early adopter – he started exploring ways to create designs using AI, which he embraces for creative projects and fun. But even he – a gen alpha – chafes at the equation he can see at this age: embrace AI more enthusiastically, potentially participate in creating a world with less likelihood of jobs for kids in his generation down the line.

He got a plant pot out of this process, but it was a bit rough and ready.  And more importantly, the prompting and correcting process felt laborious and limiting. Another instance – of the many I’ve observed so far –of AI supposedly bringing efficiency but actually making the work a bit more onerous.

So, he decided to make his own design, and a couple of days later, I got a beautiful vase from him. I had to pay him for it, but at least I got it at a discounted price since I’d been the one to pay for the filament. So now the business development continues in earnest, and he’s really proud of his efforts.

He recognises that he feels much more pride because it’s all his own work, and I feel equally proud. Every single task and decision was his alone. All I’ve done is supply my credit card details for filament purchase – and hopefully not for him to save and use for any other purposes.

When I heard him talking about his pride, the word stuck in my mind. When I think about times in my own career I’ve felt this, it’s come particularly at the successful completion of a project or task that involved effort. It’s not a feeling that is especially generated when I’ve short-cut my way to a decent solution through leaning heavily on AI. 

I get a more fleeting sort of satisfaction in those moments – like I’ve cheated the system a little. I’ve figured out the code to play by today’s optimisation culture rules, and I’ve freed up more time for… what? Well, not going to the gym like the hustle bros, that’s for sure. Just more work. I suppose, just like the hustle bros.  Except that I’ve also got parenting to deal with, and they can just opine on parenting and birth rates from afar (looking at you, Steven Bartlett).

The best things often do involve some friction to achieve – and true optimisation (not just engineering supposed max efficiency into a process) comes through that friction. And when we’ve worked our way through the tricky points, the pivots and the problems that are hard to crack, we feel a greater sense of accomplishment than if that path had been smooth. AI often smooths that path.

I find the emphasis on the quality of prompting being ‘the thing’ that we stand by as a skill really weird. We’ve valorised the effort that goes into writing prompts, and sure, there can be a difference between what you get out from a short prompt vs a really considered one. 

But I personally feel that in a good LLM, that difference is often overstated, because we have to validate that some effort has gone into the process – that we’ve invested ourselves somehow, not just surrendered to an LLM.  Well, honestly, I can write a few lines of prompt in Claude with barely a second’s thought and what I’ll get back is terrifyingly good. It really doesn’t take much effort. What I’ve then got to resist is the temptation to just fire off endless prompts – more noise, more stuff, more content no-one needs.

Cultural futurist Jasmine Bina has observed that “a lot of the anxiety we're living with right now can be explained by this: effort no longer explains outcomes”. She suggests that “That tension is driving much of the strange behaviour we see across work, media and branding right now. It’s also where the most interesting experiments in community, loyalty, and value are starting to emerge… We're watching people search for new ways to measure a life”.

I can anticipate push-back as some of the emerging codes of this new space, e.g. ‘look how much craft I put into prompting my AI’ get really tired. One of the most interesting forms of push-back might come when we take a step back and interrogate why we’re all so busy trying to move faster and be more productive. 

My son – definitely not at risk of being infected by optimisation culture (there’s still got to be time for plenty of The Simpsons) – has understood that more fast-turnaround work using AI just risks creating more slop and a hollow feeling inside. If we so dramatically engineer the work landscape over time that fewer of us have jobs, we will weaken an important way of people gaining a sense of purpose and supporting their mental health. 

For now, perhaps we should take a beat and observe how we feel when we remove friction and effort from our day-to-day work. Do we have much sense of pride? What do we do with the time we supposedly save? And how does all that make us feel? 

Louise McLaren is managing director (London) at Lovebrands and a columnist for Research Live. You can read all of her columns here.