Efficiency Is Easy

// The Build

I've been building the new website for Let Them Create this week - I've been using Claude for the first time properly to write code - everything is being built in WordPress and I've asked it to build a custom Content Management System (CMS) on the back end so I can update everything myself - I just wanted to see how far it could go.

I'm not paying someone to build it - not briefing a designer, not waiting on a developer - just me, a laptop, and Claude doing the coding whilst I point and say "more of that, less of that." like some jumped up foreman on a building site.

If you want my honest opinion? It's been impressive. Pages going up, copy appearing and there is a structure forming - things that would have taken weeks are taking hours - I'm not going to pretend it isn't a little bit magic because not being a developer has meant I've always used 'drag and drop' website builders which can be limiting - but somewhere in the middle of it all, I noticed something uncomfortable.

It's building the site the way it thinks a site should be built - the templates its clearly learned from are formulaic.

Clean navigation bar across the top, logical hierarchy and clear calls to action in sensible places - Everything where a visitor would expect it to be - all of which is fine - genuinely fine - but it's not really how I wanted my website to look and feel and it's not really how I work. I want it to be a little messy.

I wander and unpick things as I go, I start in the middle and I put the thing you weren't expecting right at the top and make you figure out why it's there. That's the whole point of Let Them Create - it's supposed to feel like something, not just function like something - it's anti-template and that's what I want in a website - its the store front!

The more I leaned on Claude and tried to get it to add little 'homemade' touches, the more the site started to look like a 'site' rather than a thing I'd made - it defaulted to efficient.

A little bit forgettable.

// The World We're In

We're living in a moment where efficiency has never been easier - I've written about it before, we're able to generate a faster output with way cleaner thinking - repeatable systems thanks to projects in ChatGPT and all the structured thinking that AI that will bring to your copy, how it structures your thinking and produces your content at a pace that would have seemed unhinged five years ago - I remember burning out because I was producing one or two posts a day and now, AI will create hundreds.

The world is rewarding it too - the content that gets made, published, distributed, iterated on and pushed out again - that's what gets seen. Speed is winning the algorithm because volume fills the feeds on Linkedin, Instagram and now TikTok.

I get it (I genuinely do) - its so fast at creating that we forget about expression. Expression - real expression - hasn't changed at all.

The thing that makes someone stop scrolling is still the same thing it always was - it's what you learn when you want to stop the scroll - the pattern interrupt, the thing that makes everything stop - when things are a bit of mess, a sentence or an image that goes somewhere you didn't expect - that's what captures attention now and that hasn't been automated. Not really.

Because you can't train a tool to have your specific, slightly inconvenient perspective on things - the one that formed from years of experience, wrong turns, closed businesses and the experiences you're living every single day - as you.

// The Comfort Trap

The danger with efficient tools isn't that they produce bad work - the danger is that they produce 'good enough' work - and good enough is seductive when you're tired, busy or trying to hit a deadline or when you just want to post and you can't think about how something should sound or look. I've said it before but you start by using it to get a baseline, then you use it to save time and then you use it because it works.

Slowly - like the 'red light, green light' game in Squid Game, almost without noticing, you start getting closer and closer to the finish line faster and you're shaping your ideas to fit what the tool can produce rather than making the tool serve what you actually want to say.

That's what I was doing with the website I think - I was answering its prompts instead of asking my own questions - I was filling in its blanks rather than writing my own brief.

The site was getting built but it just wasn't getting that feeling of being mine.

// What Efficiency Can't Do

I'm not anti-efficiency - I want to be clear about that.

I use these tools every day and I think anyone who says they don't or won't is either lying or making their life harder for no reason because there's a version of this work that's genuinely better because of AI and I'm not going to pretend otherwise - I could have written this entire article with AI and it would have flowed beautifully, read in a coherent way (did you read last weeks mash up of an article) and it would have zero spelling mistakes (and the grammar would be immaculate).

Efficiency is a vehicle, not a destination.

It gets you to the work faster - it does not do the work for you, not the real work. Not the bit that requires you to have an actual opinion, a weird tangent, a story about a man who was building his website using Claude and had an epiphany.

That bit is still yours - that's the secret sauce. That is expression.

And I think the risk for anyone who creates - whether that's content, businesses, products, anything - is mistaking the vehicle for the destination - thinking that because the thing got made quickly, it got made well.

Speed is not the same as honesty.

// The Return

I went back to the Let Them Create build this evening (as I'm typing this) and I started again - not from scratch, but from the perspective of the fact that I wanted the website to feel like me - I started by asked different questions, ignored the logical structure it kept nudging me toward and put something on the homepage that probably isn't where most people would put it.

It's starting to feel better - the output it slower and it's a little more uncomfortable to work with because I'm having to get it to do things in an unconventional way but it has to look right and convey the message I want - if it takes twice as long as it should (using AI, obviously) then, if I'm honest, is probably a sign I'm on the right track - it's still probably faster than me coding the thing myself or using drag and drop.

Efficiency is easy.

Anyone can be efficient now - that's almost the whole point - the harder thing to do - the thing that still takes something special, is being yourself at speed. You need to not let the ease of the tool become the ceiling of the work - don't pen yourself in because there is a templated version of perfection waiting for you - that's not your output, that's someone else's (who isn't even real)

Because if everyone has access to the same tools, and everyone leans on those tools the same way - what exactly is left that's yours?

That question is the only one worth working on.