Something quietly shifted when I shipped Muévete.
I’d built a real product. It had a map and a booking page and a privacy policy and a domain. It took a few days. It cost less than a hundred dollars. And somewhere in the middle of feeling good about that, a more uncomfortable thought arrived: if I can do this, anyone can.
Which means the thing I built isn’t valuable because I built it. It might be valuable because people want it. Those are different claims, and only one of them holds up as the tools get better and the barrier gets lower.
We are entering an era where creation itself — writing, coding, designing, composing — is being commoditized. Not the outputs. Not yet, and maybe not ever entirely. But the act of creating, the skill and effort that used to make creators scarce, is becoming less and less of a differentiator.
I’ve been thinking about what that means. Not just economically, but for how we understand ourselves.
What creation used to mean
For most of human history, the ability to make things was tied up with identity in a deep way. Craftsmen, artists, writers, builders — these weren’t just job descriptions. They were ways of being someone. The thing you made was evidence of who you were. Your skill was yours. It couldn’t be copied without years of effort.
That connection between making and meaning ran through everything. The pride of craft. The satisfaction of a thing well built. The specific texture of an object that bears the marks of a human hand.
A lot of that is still available. But it’s becoming optional in a way it never was before. You can now produce without mastering. You can ship without suffering. The apprenticeship is no longer required.
The uncomfortable math
Here’s what I keep returning to: if everyone can build, then building is table stakes, not differentiator. The value moves somewhere else.
In software it already moved — from writing code to understanding what to build and for whom. In writing it’s moving — from producing clean prose to having a genuine perspective. In design it’s moving — from executing visuals to understanding what a visual is supposed to make someone feel.
The pattern is consistent: as the execution layer gets automated, the value concentrates at the judgment layer. What should exist? For whom? Why does it matter? These questions were always important. They’re now the only questions that compound.
Where value actually lives
I want to make a claim that might sound sentimental but I think is just true: in a world where creation is cheap, human connection is the scarce resource.
Not human-generated content. Not authentic personal branding. Actual connection — the experience of being understood by another person, of being in a relationship with someone who sees you specifically, of being part of a community that exists because people chose each other.
That can’t be automated. Not because the technology isn’t good enough yet — though that’s also true — but because the value of human connection is constituted by its humanness. An AI that perfectly simulates a friend isn’t a friend. The simulation might be indistinguishable. The thing itself is absent.
This matters more as everything else becomes abundant. When content is infinite, attention becomes scarce. When products are cheap to build, trust becomes scarce. When anyone can produce anything, the signal value of a specific human perspective — someone who has actually lived something, thought something, changed their mind about something — goes up, not down.
The identity question
Here’s the harder version: if we can no longer tie our identities to our work — to the thing we make and how well we make it — where does a sense of self come from?
I don’t think this is a crisis. I think it’s a clarification.
The version of identity that depended on craft scarcity was always a little fragile. It worked as long as the skill was hard to acquire. When the skill becomes easy, the identity built on top of it has to find a different foundation.
What’s left is character. Judgment. Relationships. The specific texture of how you move through the world and treat people and show up when things are hard. None of that is automatable. All of it compounds.
This is, when I sit with it, actually kind of beautiful. The things that make a person worth knowing — curiosity, generosity, integrity, the willingness to say something true even when it’s uncomfortable — these were always more important than what they could produce. We just had a long period where productivity was a reasonable proxy for those things because productivity was hard and required sustained commitment.
That proxy is breaking down. Which means we have to find the real thing.
What I’m actually arguing
Not that AI is bad. Not that human creators are doomed. Not that everything is going to be fine.
What I’m arguing is that the commoditization of creation forces a question that was always worth asking: what are you actually for? Not what can you produce. What do you bring to the people around you that matters because you specifically brought it?
For most of history, the answer included skill and output. Going forward, it’s going to be weighted much more heavily toward judgment, relationship, and character.
That’s a harder thing to build. It’s also a more durable one.
The fishing trip still isn’t planned. But I’m starting to think that’s not really the point.
This is the fourth in a series on building Muévete AI. Start from the beginning here.