It took me some time to figure out why most modern houses feel off. Not modernist houses — those tend to be honest about what they are. I mean the standard new-build suburban home. Everything looks fine. Clean lines, neutral tones, nothing obviously wrong. But you walk in and something doesn’t sit right.
The materials are lying.
Vinyl floors pretending to be wood. Plastic trim pretending to be metal. Vinyl siding shaped to look like shingles. Plastic plants. Astroturf. Layer after layer of imitation, each one close enough to pass at a glance but wrong in the hand, underfoot, in the way light hits it. The house doesn’t feel like a home. It feels like something pretending to be one.
Honest materials — wood that looks like wood, metal that looks like metal, stone that looks like stone — have a quality that imitations can’t reproduce. Not because they’re expensive, but because they’re themselves. They age. They wear. They respond to touch and light in ways that are consistent with what they are. Your brain picks up on that coherence even if you can’t articulate it.
The AI Parallel
AI can produce text, code, designs that look structurally correct. The format is right. The tone is plausible. The surface is polished. But it can feel like vinyl flooring — competent in appearance, hollow underneath.
Not always. When grounded in real context and directed by someone who knows what they’re after, AI produces genuine work. But left to its defaults, it produces the equivalent of a model home: everything in its place, nothing out of place, and nothing that feels like anyone actually lives there.
The tell is the same in both cases. You can’t always point to the specific thing that’s wrong. You just feel it. The coherence is missing — that quality of a thing being what it actually is, all the way through.
When I built our house, I spent hours getting the siding pattern right. Real materials, real constraints, real decisions about how things meet and age. That attention to authenticity is the same thing that separates AI work that lands from AI work that just fills space.
Use real materials. In houses and in everything else.
