Traditional coding is additive. You start with nothing and build up, layer by layer, until the thing exists. Working with AI has inverted this for me. Now I start with a mass of material and carve away until what remains is essential.
The process feels closer to sculpting than construction.
Starting with Clay
You give the AI context. Lots of it. The problem space, the constraints, examples of what you’re after. It generates something fairly complete. Not perfect, but substantial. A block of marble with a figure somewhere inside.
Then the real work begins. Not adding more, but removing. Stripping unnecessary UI elements. Tightening the interaction until it feels inevitable. You’re not building toward a vision. You’re revealing it.
This happens at every level. Capabilities get scoped down. Screens get consolidated. Buttons disappear. What started as a sprawling possibility space contracts into something focused and coherent.
A Different Manifestation
Recently I was reworking a piece of existing software. Rather than patching features onto what existed, I started fresh by defining a new object model with the AI. Just the core entities and their relationships. Nothing else.
What emerged wasn’t an improved version of the old thing. It was a fundamentally different manifestation of the same problem. The new structure suggested interactions the old architecture couldn’t support. Constraints that felt arbitrary before now had clear reasons, or vanished entirely.
The shape was always there. The old implementation had just obscured it.
Malleable Material
This is what working with malleable material feels like. Clay doesn’t resist. You can push it around, see what happens, pull it back if it doesn’t work. The cost of exploration drops to nearly zero.
But the discipline remains. Knowing when to stop removing. Recognizing when you’ve found the essential form. That judgment doesn’t come from the AI. It comes from years of craft, applied to a radically different process.
