AI made me fast. Craft is what makes it good.
A first post about how I actually work — and why the tool was never really the point.
Robbie Lockie
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3 min read
I've been making things on the internet since 1999. For most of that time the hard limit was never ideas — it was hands. How many hours I had. How fast I could cut. How much I could design before the deadline landed. You learn to work inside that limit. You also learn to resent it.
AI took the limit off. I can hold an idea in my head at breakfast and have a rough film by lunch. That still feels slightly unreal to me, and I've been doing it a while now.
But here's the thing nobody selling you an AI tool wants to say out loud: speed is not the same as good. A model will happily generate a hundred versions of a mediocre idea. It'll give you the obvious shot, the obvious cut, the obvious colour — because obvious is the average, and averages are what these things are built on. Left alone, AI makes work that looks like everyone else's.
The 27 years is what stops that happening. Knowing when a cut lands a beat too late. Knowing the "better" take is actually the flat one. Knowing which frame to throw away. None of that comes from the tool. It comes from doing the work badly for a long time until you stop.
How I actually work now
- Ideas first, always. If the idea's weak, a faster pipeline just gets you to weak sooner.
- Point AI at the grind. The drafts, the variations, the donkey work that used to eat the whole day.
- Then slow down. The last 10% — the grade, the mix, the timing, the one detail that makes it feel made by a person — is still done by hand. It's still the part that matters.
AI makes me fast. Twenty-seven years of craft is what makes it good.
What this blog is for
Not AI hype, and not AI doom. Just notes from someone using these tools every day to make real things — films, sites, music, campaigns — and trying to keep them human.
I'll write about the tech as it actually shows up in the work. About design, and how most of it is just deciding what to leave out. About the places I travel and what they do to the way I see. Some of it will be useful. Some of it will just be me thinking out loud.
If that's your kind of thing, stick around. And if you're building something and want a hand — that's what I do.
— Robbie