On the future shape of creative work and its workers

I was reading a thread today on threads. It was one of those "you are only using 10% of HYPE technology today. Here's the secrets you are missing out on" kind of posts. But I'm interested in this topic where the HYPE tech in question was cursor, an AI based tool for software development. So I clicked

The missing 80% of cursor productivity (apparently)

I can't post the entire thread here but if I had to summarize, most of the thread discussed how to manage supporting files to help the agent code. Most of those files were about documenting past decisions, storing context around architecture (including db schemas and API endpoints), and ensuring that next actions were highly focused and well planned out todos. While there was some architectural expertise sprinkled in there such as notes about avoiding deeply nested conditionals, they sounded more like instructions I would provide in some kind of BEST_PRACTICES.md file for the coding agent to review.

What's notable about this thread and many others like it is that the shape of software development is starting to look entirely different from what it is today. The act of dropping into code to manually handle something feels closer to being viewed as a bug; the goal is for the agent to tirelessly work on the task in iterations until it says "done". The developer reviews the agent's work, updates the various documentation files to tweak the agent's approach or give it more context, and then it's on to the next todo. Even the reviewing of the agent's work feels like it's getting closer to "test feature manually to make sure nothing is broken badly" rather than actually reading the code yourself. Touching code will very likely be a bug in the future. Deciding on architectures on your own may also very well be a bug in the future if you are developing something non novel.

I don't mean this negatively. Today we don't tweak assembly to eke out performance gains. We either hand it over to the compiler or trust the deities of silicon to normalize more RAM inside of a machine. Today we don't do a lot of work from scratch. We use existing game engines, web frameworks, and libraries. But, there is a difference.

The shape of software development feels like it's shifting away from the more deterministic kind of thinking, one which we would associate with a more mathematical and logical approach, to a non deterministic approach. An approach which requires only the parts responsible for taking an idea and planning out a path to achieve it by breaking it down into requirements, todos, and detailed descriptions. I'm not saying it's not creative. It's a different kind of creative. And it's not one which the software developers of today are all going to find interesting in the future.

The parallel to art

We are hearing signs of this in the creative industry already. Time pressed low budget (relative to the rest of the industry) shops are using AI to generate the base ideas. Artists are not expected to do idea explorations. Instead they are expected to find styles that are inside the AI or just retrain a local model with an existing style and then tweak the results from there.

While some will disagree, I'd argue that given that there is still problem solving in there, it is still creative work. In the best case, artists may actually do style exploration, and then retrain a local model to use the in house style. But I'm willing to bet that even then, the style explorations are being done with AI generating the base ideas and the artists are tweaking on top of it.

Low poly cyberpunk art already exists. A low budget house would gladly avoid having to recreate the style in house if they can just feed examples into the beast and have it spit out workable concepts in a shorter time.

I know artists hate this and rightfully so. And I make no arguments to carry water for an industry that absolutely did not do this ethically. But I am going to write based on a world that exists. So, in this world, there are still artists. But their role looks very different. The creativity is still there. But it's shifting where it applies to and just like software developers of today, not all artists of today are going to find this work of the future to be interesting.

Unemployment?

I'm not going to beat around the bush. There's been lots of talk about how AI will affect employment in the future. And yes I believe there will be displacement. I also believe a lot of the conversation is ignoring one side of how this displacement will happen. People are saying that "AI will take over jobs and there'll be less work to do". I think that's silly personally. People are saying "AI won't take over your job, but someone using AI to do that job will take over", which I agree with but at the same time I feel like the framing is incomplete. The framing of the latter statement makes it seem like it's about raw productivity, how much work you do per hour, while ignoring the other part which is how much fulfillment do you get from the work you do.

The creative workers of today may not enjoy what the creative work of tomorrow looks like.

Many, not all, software developers love feeling the code with their hand. Taking those todos and turning it into working machine code. Questioning those requirements and implementing intelligent solutions to solve it minimally. Those same devs are not going to enjoy repeatedly asking the computer to do some thinking for them and then judging those thoughts and telling the computer to go implement the final chosen approach. Again, it's not that it's not creative work. It's a different category of creative work entirely is all I'm saying. Same for art. Same for music. Same for writing probably.

I wonder just how many people will be displaced out of pure dislike for what their jobs eventually look like.

The shape of creative work is changing and at some point, the shape of the creative workers of today is no longer going to fit the requirement.

Conclusion

I wish I had more to say on the topic. But I don't. My heart bleeds for the people who will out of need, stick on with work that once gave them purpose but have now become soul sucking entities. My heart is hopeful for people who will find joy in the new form of creativity and who will enter careers that never existed before because it is what suits them better.

If anyone reads this and you are part of traditional creative work, I do hope you take one thing away from this. Really really dig in and ask yourself what part of that work you do brings you actual joy. I suspect that answer is going to be very important to each of us to find our place in a changed world tomorrow.

This blog doesn't have a comment box. But I'd love to hear any thoughts y'all might have. Send them to [email protected]

Posted on July 24 2025 by Adnan Issadeen