AI Is Coming for Every Bluff We Live By
Michael Novati - Personal Essays
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AI Is Coming for Every Bluff We Live By<br>As AI calls every bluff in modern work, the real question is not what survives automation — it’s what was ever worth doing by hand.
Michael Novati<br>Jul 27, 2026
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You buy a toaster. It breaks in two years. You buy another toaster. The company that made it takes a 40% margin on both, and this is a completely normal American story.<br>We used to be a place where lasting a really long time, at roughly the same price, was the clearest sign of quality. A refrigerator that ran for 20 years but cost the same as one that died after 10 had an obvious competitive advantage. Now the advantage is flashy features, constant product cycles, and technology with extraordinarily high margins, because code gets written once and reproduced infinitely. Durability is no longer necessarily the thing the market rewards. Sometimes it is actively bad for business.<br>Ever since Claude Code and Opus 4.5 showed the first real glimmer of automating work we had convinced ourselves was uniquely valuable, I’ve had thoughts racing through my mind. One of them makes me strangely hopeful, although I’m also concerned about the consequences of it, and that is the possibility that AI might bring craftsmanship back.<br>Fast fashion rewards garbage quality in whatever style people want this week. Hermès is doing fine, but even they seem to be compromising at the edges with accessories collections that aren’t quite the classic handmade products people imagine when they think about the brand. And, if the reporting is accurate, some luxury brands—which I won’t name—will literally burn their excess inventory instead of selling it at a discount, because they don’t want those items circulating among a different demographic and weakening the perception of exclusivity.<br>These are just observations I’ve collected over the years. I’m sure you’ve made versions of them too. We live in a capitalist society that rewards the highest possible margin, at the lowest possible cost, sold to the largest possible number of customers. Eventually, things break.<br>The basic problem is that if you make an extremely high-quality product that costs twice as much as a competitor’s, but is only 20% better and lasts only 20% longer, most people will not value it at twice the price. They might say they care about craftsmanship, but they won’t necessarily pay for it. And once the parts and labor can’t be squeezed any further, the company gets forced downmarket into the mass-production cycle: far more products, made more cheaply, sold at whatever price the brand name can still carry. Very few brands continue caring deeply about quality once the market stops rewarding them for it.<br>And that is where AI comes in: our good friends Claude and ChatGPT.<br>AI is getting rid of garbage reproducible work. Anything that is normal, repeatable, explainable, or reducible to a process is becoming less valuable, and we’re still trying to figure out what value even means in a world full of intelligence. The word *taste* gets thrown around constantly here. AI will replace the programmers, replace customer support, replace sales, replace marketing, and taste is supposedly what will empower the humans who have it.<br>Maybe.<br>I think we’re also so scared by the possibility that 70% of our jobs could be replaced that it’s mentally difficult to imagine what that world actually looks like, or what taste really means once we get there. It’s hard to calmly theorize about the future of human value while wondering whether your own role is about to disappear.<br>But follow the idea all the way through. We’re going to pour enormous amounts of energy, money, computing power, and human knowledge into these systems. AI will find materials we didn’t know existed and processes we didn’t know were possible. It should be able to help us make higher-quality items for lower costs, assuming the raw ingredient isn’t some magical herb that only grows on one island in the Atlantic. And that makes me wonder whether we’re actually in for a rebound in quality.<br>Maybe we’re in for a rebound because AI is going to expose the bluff—the capitalism bluff—that has powered so many businesses that produce garbage with a brand name attached to it. Or businesses that started with something great and then slowly slippery-sloped their way into producing garbage without any individual person ever deciding that was the goal.<br>AI is going to look at the product and say: this is garbage. We can do better for almost nothing. This metal is unnecessarily thick. That metal is too thin. This component is failing because your assembly line should be configured differently. This material is expensive for no reason. This part could last three times as long with a tiny change that no one bothered to make.<br>Those are all things that, historically, some unique unicorn human with magical taste and decades of intuition might have noticed....