Alright. I want you to read this. Earlier today, I released a new component. What you see is the finished result. What you don’t see are the days of planning, research, testing, designing, simplifying, throwing ideas away, and trying again before I felt it was ready. Within hours, it had been copied and ported to another framework by pointing an agent at my code. Of course, it’s open source. They were allowed to do it. And I’ve been around long enough, with multiple successful products, that I don’t care. But what if this was someone’s first product? What if they spent months building it, launched on Friday, and by Monday it had been cloned by agents, repackaged, and made free? What happens when your second product is copied? Your fifth? Your tenth? What happens when every new idea immediately becomes the next prompt? What happens when your roadmap, your changelog, and your launch announcements become someone else input prompts? What happens when models become good enough to copy bigger ideas? What happens when “just execute better” stops being the answer? What happens when “just build bigger” or “think wider” stops being enough? What happens when both ideas and execution become cheap? What happens when the creator pays the full cost of creativity but everyone else pays nothing to reproduce it? What happens to creativity when AI makes copying effectively free? What happens to the will to create when AI makes copying effectively free? Look, copying is not new. Copying at this speed, cost, and scale is. People will tell you to think bigger. But nobody starts "bigger". Every one of us here started by making something small. You keep going because, somewhere along the way, the work is rewarded. Maybe people use it. Maybe they pay for it. Maybe they simply recognize the thought, effort, and care that went into it. Copying once demanded effort. You had to study the work and understand it to copy it. That effort created appreciation for the person who made it. Not anymore. Creativity begins with small steps. If we make those first steps feel pointless, we don’t just lose small products. We lose the people who might have gone on to build the big ones. We are uniquely positioned here. We get to use and experience this life-changing technology before almost everyone else. How we use it will set the default everywhere else. That default will spread to writing, design, music, research, and every other field where someone still has to take the first creative risk. We can use AI to build great things. Or we can use it to strip every new idea for parts. We decide.

File over app File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom. File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data. In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last. The pyramids of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them. The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs. Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems. Paraphrasing something I wrote recently: > If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s. You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve. These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian (@obsdmd), but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.