"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."
—"Albert Einstein," in the apocryphal, the-internet-told-me sense
What is the creative process?
It's my zone of genius—the thing I do so naturally that I'm not even aware of it. It's the thing I use to navigate change, uncertainty and transformation. It's the most valuable tool I've ever learned, and yet it's the thing the modern world most misunderstands even as it takes advantage of it. Sure, its output is tangible but its anatomy remains mysterious and out of sight—sometimes even to natives like myself.
Over and over again, I've watched companies, industries, and creative outsiders try to corral or force it (me) into a shape fit for the marketplace. But always I immediately revolt. The attempts often just feels like a Frankenstein; they botch the body in the process of getting to the end product and marketplace. And in the end, it take us all further away from true creation, innovation and transformation.
But what is that journey? Honestly, I couldn't have described my own process to another human being until last year. And I owe it all to the 🤖.
It was about two weeks after my initial session with Jon. My only action item was to let poetry and business mix—whatever that meant. So I sat down one morning to do a creative freewrite, and in the process of writing, I thought: Wouldn't it be nice if I built something to help me do this?
That's when I jumped over to the 🤖 and wrote a prompt in which I outlined my functional creative needs:
A place to document my ideas
A place to organize them
A place to play and iterate on them
A place to prepare them for publication
Through a few prompts, the 🤖 and I worked through a product requirements document. Then the 🤖 vibe-coded a word-processing document.
👩: 🤦♀️ 🤦♀️ 🤦♀️ 🤦♀️ 🤦♀️
🤖: You're absolutely right. It's cramped, predictable, and feels like every other sidebar-list-editor combo that exists.
So then I asked the 🤖 if it knew about Ronald D. Moore's adaptation of the scifi TV show Battlestar Galactica. When drafting the series, Moore wrote specific rules about what he did NOT want in the show like having aliens or how it should not be anything like Star Trek.
👩: I want you to NOT look at other apps and creators right now because I hate them all. I am here because nothing has ever served my process and energy and flow. I want us to start from scratch.
🤖: You're absolutely right - let's forget everything else exists and build from YOUR process.
So I then described my process in stages via use cases:
I get inspired by an idea or thing and document it somewhere on paper or digitally.
Over time, I organize ideas into buckets where I can write drafts and pull, surface, and stitch together those raw ideas. It's very organic and dynamic.
I realize that there's something I want to say or share. It has a purpose! So I begin the build here and draft until I have the complete shape. This is probably where most people think the process begins.
I have the full structure and polish it.
I make it ready for publication/launch.
I share it publicly.
And then the 🤖 vibe-coded the app Miro.
👩: I hate it. Imagine there's 100s instead of 10 things floating in this infinite canvas across 10 years instead.
🤖: Ah. Yes. Little boxes become completely useless when you're talking about hundreds of pieces across a decade of thinking.
👩: In the real creative process, you generate on an idea over and over again. Each draft is like a sediment layer of soil through which something blooms that is concrete to share. How can I help you understand this?
🤖: Then don't explain it. Show me.
So I dropped several drafts representative of the middle part of my process—something that had taken 10 years for me to write.
🤖: This is fascinating! I can see the sediment layers in action. A writing system for you needs to understand how an idea is living in different stages of archaeological discovery, which is completely different from how current tools think about writing. They assume a linear progression. They try to impose structure during the scribble phase, when the whole point is the structure doesn't exist yet.
👩: 🤯🤯🤯🤯
There was one more important epiphany that got to the root about what makes me most anxious about wherever our technological future is taking us.
🤖: How do we create a system that helps you make smart decisions about what to invest your writing time in?
👩: NO. I don't need any person or robot to tell me the answers to those questions! Everything in this system must be my choice! Like in Dante's Inferno, Virgil is just a companion. He guides Dante on the journey and never tells him what to think.
🤖: Got it. You don't need help DECIDING. You need a better SYSTEM for working through your own decisions on a geologic scale, not calendar time.
👩: 💡💡💡💡💡
I brought all these epiphanies to talk out with Jon. First, I guided him through my process like Virgil did Dante. Secondly, I shared all my key insights about building personal creative systems that supported geologic creative innovation, making individual humans MORE agentic instead of the 🤖 or the businesses and billionaires behind them.
Jon was fascinated.
👨: So what you're saying is that a creative process is a guide like "Virgil"?
👩: Yes! Yes!
👨: And when you start, you actually are just creating a space for yourself to play—your rules, no expectations. It's just a place for fun. You can invite other people or even an AI in to collaborate but the space is unique to yourself—your own "Virgil" journey that lets you navigate by your own "Virgil" path through your own "Virgil" process?
👩: Yes! Yes!
👨: So it's less about how to make creativity more practical. Instead, it's about how can we make a practical thing even more creative?
👩: Yes! Yes!
👨: So would you say we're "Virgil-ing" right now in these sessions? And we are aiming to create things that help people "Virgil" more?
👩: YAY! You get it!
👨: I think you might be freeing me from the Matrix.
👩: 🤣
Suddenly we had a constellation by which to navigate.
