Context is currency.
The new creative edge is clarity, taste, and intent.
The age of cheap AI.
Models are commoditized.
Outputs are PhD-level.
Creation is no longer scarce - clarity is.
You can prompt a film, a book, an app, or a brand into existence in minutes.
So the real question is: what’s worth making? Why?
Simply put, cheap AI dramatically increases the value of judgment.
It creates multiple ‘filter premiums.’
The synthesis premium.
How well can you translate your aesthetic instincts into structured communication that guides others — or AIs — toward novel, high-quality outputs?
Prompting isn’t writing. It’s briefing.
A great prompt is a design brief for a mind that isn’t yours — whether human or machine. It’s a clarity exercise. A test of taste. 1
To unlock synthesis, consider how you:
Curate reference data: Define the semantic boundary of your idea. Use past work, visuals, language, and analogies to triangulate intent.
Design creative constraints: Articulate purpose, tone, format, audience. Constraints don’t limit creativity — they direct it.
Refine through feedback loops: Treat every generation as a conversation. Iterate like a designer, not a dictator.
Your ability to guide synthesis is your leverage.
It’s not about knowing what to say — it’s about knowing how to build the sandbox where great ideas can emerge.
The clearer your creative architecture, the more powerful your tools become.
The sequencing premium.
How well can you sequence the work between humans and machines to maximize clarity, creativity, and output?
AI doesn’t replace people.
It replaces tasks.
The modern creative isn’t just a maker — they’re a conductor.
They orchestrate workflows across multiple agents, both human and artificial.
To do this well, you must ask:
What should humans stop doing? Which tasks are low-leverage, repetitive, or easily automated?
What should machines be doing? Where can AI generate drafts, fill gaps, or test permutations faster than you ever could?
What should humans do more of? Where does nuance, ethics, taste, or originality still matter deeply?
Machines are getting faster.
But humans are still better at knowing why something matters.
The future belongs to those who can choreograph workflows.
Who knows when to delegate to code and when to lean on human intuition?
Your sequencing skill is how you leverage time and talent — at scale.
The orchestration premium.
How well can you design the system that keeps your team’s intelligence, data, and tools flowing?
AI is only as good as the context it runs on.
Orchestration is the art of making that context usable.
You’re no longer just managing data.
You’re managing creative infrastructure.
Key capabilities:
Context Capture & Curation: Treat historical files, reference materials, and team knowledge as sacred assets. AI can’t create real value without a foundation of real context.
Custom Model Alignment: Train lightweight internal models on your team’s domain-specific knowledge. Think of this as building an internal brain — tuned to your taste, terminology, and edge cases.
Toolchain Design: Integrate AI systems across workflows. Ensure context flows across tools — from design to research to dev.
The new role of technical and creative leads is to:
Serve as curators of captured context, and orchestrators of intelligent systems.
If you can control the flow of data, intent, and feedback — you don’t just accelerate output. You multiply intelligence.
IT’s new job?
Context librarian. IP unlocker. Orchestrator of creative energy.
The rise of contextual intelligence.
AI made creation abundant.
What’s scarce now is clarity.
Anyone can generate.
Not everyone can filter, sequence, and orchestrate.
The future won’t be won by the most technical or the most creative.
It will be won by those who can:
Curate rich context
Constrain with precision
Manage hybrid teams of humans and machines
Translate intent across mediums and systems
In every era of technological revolution, the best communicators win.
In this one, the best context architects will lead.2
Your job isn’t to outrun the machines. To be the loudest or the fastest.
Your job is to raise the standard of intention.
To out-curate. To out-brief. To out-direct the noise.
In the age of AI, context is leverage.
Clarity is power.
Be the one who knows what to build.
Be the one who knows why it matters.
Be the one who can say it clearly — and say it proud.
A great analogy from Anthropic’s founders is to think of AI as a nation of millions of expert PhDs that you communicate with via API.
Cursor, a coding development environment, is a strong data point that supports this trend. It helps developers manage the context of their intent. It does this so well that its Cursor is the fastest-growing SaaS company of all time, from $1M to $100M in ARR, hitting the $100M milestone in roughly 12 months at the end of 2024—faster than Wiz (18 months), Deel (20 months), and Ramp (24 months).