We live in a strange creative century. The tools got louder while the work stayed the same. AI, automation, content everywhere, but making still comes down to curiosity, clarity, and showing up. This isnt a guide or a sermon. Its a field note from the middle of the mess, a philosophy of making for people who think better when they build things.
I. The Shape of Thought
I’ve always liked plain text. Markdown or a clean list in a terminal window. No hidden formatting voodoo or mystery tabs. Just words behaving themselves. You can open it in anything and it still makes sense. Honest work.
My brain needs that. It’s allergic to clutter. Give it a clean grid and it purrs. Structure isn’t what I write about; it’s how I stay sane while doing it. Every bullet, every indent, every bit of spacing is a small act of control in a world that doesn’t take requests.
Plain text became a philosophy before I noticed. It forces me to earn clarity instead of faking it with bold fonts and pastel boxes. You can’t hide behind formatting in a .md file. Either the thought lands, or it doesn’t.
Making, for me, is less about the final product and more about the wrestling match in the centre ring. That moment when chaos starts to line up, when an idea stops flailing and finally sits still. Ten count… he’s out! The text or system that comes out the other end is just the receipt.
I’m not chasing neatness. I’m chasing coherence. Trying to find the shape of thought, one line, one half-baked idea, one “what if” at a time.
II. When the Machines Learned Our Language
Then the machines showed up speaking Markdown. One day they were babbling about neural nets, and the next they were writing tidy bullet lists like they’d been lurking in my notes for years. While everyone else was panicking about AI stealing their jobs, I was quietly amused that it finally learned to read my chicken scratch.
Large language models don’t care about brand guides or PowerPoint templates. They crave order. Give them lists, headers, XML, and they hum like a fridge. My habit of labeling thoughts and stacking ideas like Lego bricks turned out to be the perfect dialect. For once, the machine and I spoke fluent structure.
It felt a little validating. Years of obsessing over spacing and indentation had secretly been boot camp for the AI age. What started as comfort in clean lines became the universal handshake between humans and algorithms. The future, apparently, speaks plaintext.
I don’t outsource the work to the model. I spar with it. It’s the collaborator that never sleeps, the colleague who doesn’t interrupt, the one you can test a bad idea on at 2 a.m. without judgment. I feed it patterns; it hands me perspective. The back-and-forth is the work.
AI isn’t killing creativity; it’s dragging the messy part of it into daylight. The false starts, the half-baked sparks, the dumb tangents that sometimes hit gold. It’s the most patient brainstorming partner I’ve ever had, as long as you speak its lingo. Mine happens to be Markdown, bullet lists, and curiosity running on caffeine and mild defiance. I aim to misbehave.
III. Story as System
I didn’t design a system. I just noticed one forming while I tried to make sense of my own chaos. The same pattern kept showing up whether I was writing, building, or troubleshooting some half-broken process at work. Four moves. Collect, analyze, structure, render. Not strategy. Survival.
Every project starts the same way: a pile of fragments. Notes, links, stray thoughts, maybe a quote from a podcast I barely remember. I throw it all into one place and call it “research.” That’s collect. It’s messy and usually too much, but it keeps the curiosity fed.
Prompt:
“Here’s a messy pile of notes and links on [topic]. Don’t summarize. Group related fragments, name the themes, and flag what’s missing or underdeveloped.”
Paste into your AI chat. Replace [topic]. Paste or insert your notes.
Then comes analyze. I stare at the pile until patterns start whispering. Sometimes the AI helps by asking smarter questions than I would. Sometimes it just mirrors my confusion until something clicks. Either way, this phase is about seeing what’s really there, not what I wish was.
Prompt:
“Start asking me smart, one-at-a-time questions about [topic]. The goal is to uncover the real problem or tension beneath the surface, not to make it sound good.”
Paste into your AI chat. Replace [topic] or just reference your notes.
Next is structure. This is where it starts to feel like making. Ideas stop floating and start snapping into place. Outlines form, diagrams appear, logic takes shape. I love this part. It’s where curiosity meets coherence. It’s also where most people bail because the high of discovery fades and the grind of organization begins. I get that. The Mid-world fog of war is seductive and exhausting in equal measure. Thankee sai.
Prompt:
“Build a rough outline based on what we’ve explored. Shape it like a story: setup, tension, resolution. Then ask what I’m really trying to say and what emotion I want to leave behind.”
Paste into your AI chat. Iterate. Later, rinse and repeat.
The last phase is render. This is the public version: writing the text, turning the private mess into something another human can use. It’s the least mysterious part but also the hardest, because it means deciding when to stop tinkering and hit publish.
Prompt:
“Draft a structured detailed outline version for [output]. Keep my tone, keep it human. Add placeholders for visuals or data where they’d help the reader see, not just read.”
Paste into your AI chat. Replace [output] with blog post, essay, brief, infographic, slide deck, etc. You can handwrite the draft from this outline. Or get the robots to help. Or work together. You do you.
Bonus Round Prompt:
“Using the outline we developed, create a single-page infographic in HTML/CSS/JS that visually tells the story.
- The design should feel like a narrative, not a dashboard: one scroll, one idea per section.
- Use semantic HTML5, clean responsive CSS (Tailwind or vanilla), and light, unobtrusive JS for any interactivity or animation.
- Respect color contrast; ensure keyboard focus for any interactive elements.
- Keep it readable and fast-loading; prefer typography and layout over color or complexity.
- Include placeholder text and icons where data or visuals will go.
- Add section comments in the code so I can see the story flow.”
Treat these as scaffolds, not scripts.
IV. Beyond the File
I grew up inside the holy trinity of Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint. Those were the starting points, but the tools that came after (Notion, Loop, and their kin) show how far storytelling has drifted from the printer’s page. If you missed that era, imagine a world where every creative act ended in a paper jam. Most of us still genuflect before the toolbar out of muscle memory.
But here’s the dirty secret: those tools were designed for printers, not people. Word breaks when you think sideways. Excel punishes anyone who feels more than one feeling at a time. PowerPoint reduces ideas to hostage notes. Every time I open one, I can hear my curiosity packing its bags.
They trained us to think in boxes: prose here, data there, visuals somewhere else if there’s time. Separate tools for separate parts of the same brain. No wonder half our work looks like it was built by committees who’ve never met each other.
The newer breed, even the stuff we hack together in Markdown, works differently. These are story surfaces, not document types. Words, data, and visuals can live on the same plane. What’s different isn’t just the layout; it’s the logic. The story lives in one flow instead of three separate silos. Text, data, and design feed each other instead of waiting their turn. When it’s all on one surface, you don’t present an idea, you walk someone through it. That’s the same principle behind a single-page infographic: one scroll, one story, zero detours. You don’t need both a briefing note and a slide deck that say the same damn thing.
That shift matters. Documents freeze thought; stories move. A slide deck dies after the presentation, but a living page keeps evolving with the idea. It’s not about being flashy. It’s about continuity. Letting thinking breathe instead of embalming it in templates.
Plain text sits quietly underneath it all, the same structure-as-sanity I keep coming back to. It’s the skeleton key that makes the layers talk to each other. Markdown (spec) and Mermaid (docs) are the Esperanto of modern making: simple enough for humans, structured enough for machines. The machines finally caught up. The file never will.
V. The Practice of Plainness
Plain text isn’t just a format. It’s a quiet rebellion against the productivity-industrial complex. It doesn’t care about fonts, branding, or whatever “personal operating system” someone’s shilling on YouTube this week. It just sits there, naked and legible, waiting for you to mean what you write.
It keeps you honest. In Word, you can hide confusion behind formatting. In Markdown, you’re out of excuses. If the idea’s broken, the syntax will rat you out. There’s no PowerPoint animation to distract from the emptiness of your thought. Just you, a blinking cursor, and the creeping realization that clarity is earned, not designed.
Plain text refuses to perform. It gives me structure, not sparkle. Headings and lists act like guardrails for attention. I don’t need gradients, widgets, or AI sidekicks pretending to manage my focus. I just need to remember what I was saying before another tab seduced me.
Plainness isn’t austerity. It’s respect. Respect for the reader, the idea, and future-me, who will eventually reopen this file and curse past-me for using some proprietary nonsense. Simplicity is mercy.
Plain text doesn’t care which device or version of capitalism your workflow currently depends on. It travels light. It will outlast whatever shiny subscription platform promises to “revolutionize thought” and then quietly dies six months later.
The longer I work this way, the more I see that plainness isn’t minimalism; it’s self-defense. Strip away the glitter and all that’s left is intent. And intent, once exposed, has nowhere to hide.
VI. The Human Loop
Making isn’t a solo sport. It’s a contact activity that occasionally produces something useful. Most of my good ideas started because I was arguing, riffing, or scheming with someone else. Colleagues, friends, or a chatbot that never needs a lunch break.
I like to plot. Sitting around with smart people, trading half-baked ideas until one of them accidentally turns good, that’s my version of church. The artifact doesn’t matter much. The spark does. Connection is the only deliverable that survives the meeting. That connection is how we learn. It’s the shared friction that turns talk into insight.
Working with AI isn’t that different. It’s collaboration without the small talk or the eye contact. The model doesn’t care about my title, deadlines, or fragile sense of genius. It just wants structure. I give it patterns, it gives me reflection. Sometimes that reflection is gold. Sometimes it’s a funhouse mirror. Either way, it keeps me thinking. It’s not replacing the human loop, just widening it. Same instincts, new medium. Curiosity scales.
The loop works because it’s a mirror with opinions. People reflect emotion; the machine reflects logic. Somewhere between those two bad habits, truth occasionally shows up looking surprised. The output is fine, but the volley is the point.
Real collaboration isn’t harmony. It’s managed chaos with snacks. The best ideas come from friction handled with curiosity and mild sarcasm. The awkward silences, the “wait, are we sure?” moments, the unplanned detours into brilliance or nonsense. That’s where new things crawl out of the swamp. The trick is staying curious long enough not to set anything on fire.
This same prompt-and-respond rhythm works in teams; the chat just keeps the thread honest.
I make to connect. To learn. To see what happens when ideas collide and something refuses to die. The medium doesn’t matter: text, chat, whiteboard, napkin. What matters is that someone else is there too, poking the same problem from a slightly different angle, hoping to make sense of the mess before it eats us.
VII. The Craft of Continuity
Making never really ends. You just run out of coffee or curiosity and pretend that’s the same thing as being done. The next idea is already skulking around, waiting for a quiet moment and an empty file. Everything I’ve ever built, written, or broken belongs to the same conversation. Most of it’s unfinished; the rest lies about it.
That’s the real trick of making: continuity. The loop never stops. You collect, analyze, structure, render. You crash, reboot, repeat. It’s not progress; it’s metabolism: staying interested enough to keep moving and humble enough to know you’re still winging it.
Creativity isn’t lightning. It’s a slow grind powered by attention, caffeine, and mild defiance. We keep tinkering because the alternative is apathy, and apathy feels like dying in a meeting that never ends.
People love to say they aren’t creative. That’s the lie we tell ourselves while scrolling through other people’s highlight reels. Everyone makes things. Meals, systems, stories, excuses. Shaping reality, even a little, is the most human thing we do.
AI doesn’t kill that impulse; it just joined the workshop. It doesn’t care who gets credit. It makes the invisible part of creativity visible again: the false starts, the rewrites, the tiny wins no one claps for. The process finally has a witness.
I make because it’s how I learn and how I help. Because curiosity needs somewhere to go. Because it feels like living on purpose. The output is just proof I showed up.
You’re a maker too. You probably always were. Grab a tool, pick a fight with a blank page, and make something that leaves a dent. The world won’t applaud, but it’ll notice. Fuck it. You made something real, and that’s the whole point.
Steal a prompt. Ship one artifact this week.
That’s continuity.
The craft never ends. It just changes hands.
That’s all a philosophy of making really is, a reminder that the work is how we stay human.
