Practice Makes Progress

Why generative AI should help us grow, not just produce

In a previous life, I was a full-time musician and composer.

I spent time every day in practice. Practicing my instrument. Sharpening my ear for harmonies and melodies. Honing my ability to convert what was in my head into notes on a page that others could interpret and perform.

Those years taught me something that feels increasingly important in the age of generative AI: repetition matters.

I practiced scales not because they were musically interesting, but because of the skills they developed.

At the time, scales felt annoyingly simple. Repetitive. Mechanical. Detached from any “real” creativity I was trying to achieve.

But over time, that changed.

My fingers stopped fumbling. My ear began hearing relationships automatically. Harmonies seemed to create themselves. My musical ideas moved more fluidly from imagination into sound.

The practice was reshaping how I thought about sound and rhythm. It increased my ability to articulate what was in my head. I gained new capabilities.

The Struggle Is the Craft

Often, while practicing, I ran into roadblocks.

A difficult melodic turn. A harmonic progression I could hear internally but could not yet execute cleanly. A passage that exposed the gap between what I wanted to express and what I was currently capable of performing.

But those moments did not discourage me. They motivated me.

Practice taught me not to fear mistakes. It taught me to seek out the edge of my ability; that boundary between facility and struggle where growth actually happens.

Over time, I began to understand that the struggle itself was not separate from the craft. The struggle was the craft.

That same feeling followed me into software development. Long debugging sessions. Architectural dead ends. Systems that resisted easy answers. And I experience it now while writing; pushing through incomplete ideas, awkward drafts, and concepts that refuse to settle cleanly on the page.

In each case, the important work happens when I reach the edge of my abilities. I discovered that creative struggle is evidence that I am stretching, growing, learning.

The Cost of Speed

Most of the public discussion around AI today centers on speed and efficiency; the ability to increase output without increasing the size of your team. What often goes unspoken is how that efficiency is achieved.

In many cases, it comes from removing creative struggle. Staying well within the comfort zone. Avoiding the difficult edge where existing skills are not quite enough. Reducing the need to wrestle with ambiguity, failure, revision, and persistence.

But that difficulty boundary is precisely where growth traditionally occurs. That is where musicians develop technique. Where programmers sharpen judgment. Where writers learn clarity. Where architects learn restraint. Where expertise forms.

Much of today’s generative AI workflow is designed to export difficulty. The LLM tools flatten out the uncertainty, hide the iteration, the rough drafting, the dead ends, and the partial failures that humans work through themselves in order to gain mastery.

The immediate result is, as so often noted, increased productivity. The long-term risk is reduced capability, atrophied creativity, and weakened skills.

Because when difficulty disappears, practice disappears with it. And when practice disappears, so does much of the mechanism through which people improve their skills, sharpen their thinking, and develop durable expertise.

Without practice, dexterity wanes.

Careful What You Wish For

If we are not careful, we could end up creating environments, at work and at home, where people gradually lose their tolerance for creative struggle. Where we assume that valuable work should never feel difficult. That uncertainty is a defect. That friction should always be removed. A world where we get used to giving up early because the system is always ready to complete the thought for us.

But that boundary line, the one between competence and challenge, is where growth has always occurred.

Instead of building systems that remove struggle, we should be building tools that support growth, demand engagement, and encourage people to remain active participants in the work.

We do not need more systems that have already looked up all the answers. We need tools that push us beyond our current capabilities. Tools that help us sharpen judgment, extend creativity, and strengthen persistence. Tools that keep us practicing our scales, exploring the harmonies and melodies of everyday life while learning to orchestrate our own future.

We need systems where difficulty is not feared, but embraced. We need tools that help us practice.

That’s an AI future I can get excited about.