generic-vs-structurednotes/ai/2026-07-10-generic-vs-structured.typ

Structured things tend to lose out to the generic dynamic thing. Primarily as the dynamic generic thing is able to adapt faster to provide a ‘good-enough’ job.

To pull an old example, see how the smartphone has slowly crowded out many markets. See also how AIs assistants are starting to crowd out many old specific applications such as data analysis suites, IDEs, templated websites, etc.

The implication is that potentially we should want to build the generic systems. In the age of AI this means that we probably want to look at building generic primitives for interacting with these systems rather than building a slick UI for any specific workflow.

To give an example, see many of the gas-town and alternatives that are now ghost-towns 6 months later.

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