Mary Camacho — Draw, Antonio. Draw.

Last week I read a novel that used a line credited to Michelangelo, scrawled on a practice sheet belonging to his student Antonio Mini: “Draw, Antonio. Draw, Antonio. Draw, and don’t waste time.” It had me think.

It might be the best mentoring ever done in under ten words. Antonio couldn’t be taught into becoming an artist. He could only draw his way there. The drawing was the learning.

And I want to say what drawing actually does. When you draw, the drawing is there. You can look at it. You can see what you know: the parts where your hand was sure, the things you got right without ever noticing you’d learned them. And you can see what you missed: the line that went wrong, the proportion you couldn’t hold, the things you didn’t know you couldn’t see until the drawing was on the page, not showing what you thought it would show. It tells you what you still need to practice, and deeper than that, what you still need to learn about how to see. That’s the mechanism. It was never effort for effort’s sake. The thing you created is the only mirror that shows you both what you can do and what you can’t yet do.

The verb changes with the century, and yet, the mechanism doesn’t change. Draw, Antonio. Code, Antonio. Build, Antonio. Create, Antonio, create.

I’ve been circling around these ideas for a while, because I was afraid they had stopped being true.

I was afraid enough that I wrote a song about it, the better part of a year ago. (Yes, I write songs. That’s its own story, for another piece.) It’s called The Vanishing Aha, and it’s about a whole new world… a second sea that “shimmers in my hand, claims to hold all knowing, and gives before I’m ready”. In plainer terms: it’s the shiny new thing that has us think it is everything. But what it does is replace the hard work of learning. I name that gap in the song:

It gives me everything but the climb.

Because the climb is precisely where the ‘ahas’ live. In the song, I described the past when learning hurt a little, “discovery came like lightning… split you open, and for a breath you were new.” It’s that lyric where my fear lived. I was afraid AI would erase my glorious experience of learning.

Learning can happen in so many ways - I learn easily by listening and by doing. And the best learning I’ve experienced is hard. I learned how to lay tile - by cutting tile and laying tile and doing it until it was right. Tile pushes back. Matthew Crawford calls that working against a recalcitrant object: a thing that doesn’t care what you believe about it and won’t negotiate. You can’t read your way past it. Your hands learn something your head can’t be told.

That kind of doing builds calluses. So my entire fear in 4 words: false mastery without calluses.

I’m not the only one who’s been afraid of this. My friend Alejandra Parra-Orlandoni just published a societal version of this same fear. She calls it the comfort ratchet. As she argues, we keep redefining difficulty as harm, then build technology to remove it, one reasonable step at a time, until we’ve engineered away forms of difficulty that were helping to form us. She’s examining that pattern across war, intimacy, and cognition at a civilizational scale. I was writing a song about myself. Same fear.

The song ends on a question it refuses to answer: is it benign?

Well, I want to report back from the other side of 8 months, because what I experienced using AI to create is pretty much the opposite. And I think I know why.

In the last seven months I built three applications. One is live. One is ready for a closed alpha test. The third one, which I’m most excited about, is coming last on purpose. I think it’s my best business application, and it comes last because the first two are my drawings. Each one is a sample I can hold, poke at, and understand the gaps from. Each one shows me what I did and what I missed, and what I still couldn’t see when I made it. The third app gets built by whoever I am after looking deeply at the first two.

And the learnings are not small. I’m not just learning my apps, or privacy features. I’m learning entire new worlds in my infrastructure tooling but more importantly I’m learning how to deliver value on infrastructure that works fundamentally differently from what platforms have been built on for the last twenty years. Nobody could have lectured that into me. I couldn’t have simply read it in a book. It had to come through doing. I built my calluses.

Here’s something about how I learn. I’m fast, but I’m also broad. I work across more context than most people, which means I often need a lot of different kinds of learning before the pieces can connect. My ahas don’t come from one domain. They come when enough different pieces get close enough to each other. At the old pace of building, the pieces arrived months apart, and through larger teams, and I couldn’t always see the connections when they showed up.

And importantly, working with AI agents at the speed they produce outputs has not taken away the judgement or the difficulty. What it changed is how many drawings land on the page, and how fast I can reassess them. That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism. Speed didn’t skip my ahas. There were enough mirror experiences, close enough together, to see in the creation both what I had already learned and what was missing, while everything was still fresh.

So the fear I had was backwards. The tool didn’t remove the practice that builds the artist. It compressed the time needed to do the learning work. More drawing, not less. I am Antonio. I am drawing. I’m drawing faster than I ever have, and my capacity is sharpening faster and more clearly than at any point in thirty years of building.

Now for a caveat about what a drawing can show me. Code pushes back, but only so far. I can easily build something correct that nobody wants. The recalcitrant object becomes the consumer, and she doesn’t negotiate. So there is a whole other set of drawings coming related to GTM. I’ll be using many of the same tools to speed up that work, and sharpening myself on iterations of experimentation and analytics. Same mechanism, harder mirror.

I want to name a fork, because the fear isn’t wrong for everyone or in all circumstances. There are two ways to use these tools, and I’ve watched them produce opposite people, opposite experiences, and this is exactly what Alejandra’s essay is addressing. If you let AI do the work for you, things ship, but you never look at a drawing of your own. There’s a verse in my song about navigators who lose sight of the stars behind a thousand glowing screens… “We arrive everywhere, but travel nowhere.” All output, but no experience.

But using AI in your creative process can also give you more reps. You draw more, not less, and every rep is still yours - you’re the one deciding, correcting, connecting the pieces. The tool doesn’t decide whether you’re still drawing. You do.

So the song finishes with a question: is it benign? All these months later, I say this new world is neither benign nor malign. It’s indifferent, and it’s a mirror. It gives you “everything but the climb” only if you stop climbing. Keep climbing and it turns out there’s more mountain in front of you than you could ever reach. The pace that you can keep with agent partners might be just what you need for achieving more reps that are closer together, allowing you to connect dots and think newly or differently. My calluses are not vanishing. They’re building up faster than they ever have.

So, five hundred years later, the advice survived the arrival of AI. When used this way, what you create with AI is still only your mirror. If you don’t create, you simply don’t learn.

Draw, Antonio. Draw.

Create, Antonio. Create.

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