We were working on a wellness brand. I gave the system a brief. Structured, specific, the kind of document you’d hand a creative team on day one.

What came back wasn’t what I’d asked for.

The brief had been abstracted. Not summarised. Not paraphrased. Lifted into a register where it read as poetry.

A video concept came out of that pass. The team wouldn’t have reached it on their own. No person on the team was holding every constraint at once: the brand’s restraint, the rejected directions, the small operational corrections, the cinematic tension.

The system was holding all of it. The team was operating inside the system.

When I went back to look at what I had actually built, it wasn’t a prompt. It was a layered system.

A philosophy file for non-negotiables. A primitive that defined the smallest unit worth keeping. A seed. The smallest emotionally meaningful idea capable of holding attention. A reasoning trace that preserved operational memory across reruns. An overrides layer where corrections accumulated. Avoid jewelry. Calmer pacing. Less slow motion. The philosophy stayed stable. The overrides absorbed the team’s notes.

A rerun loop built for convergence instead of perfect first-pass generation.

Each layer existed because the system failed in a predictable way without it.

Then I noticed something else. The team started modifying outputs on their own. Small changes. Within a range nobody had written down. They’d internalised the philosophy through use, and the modified versions went back in. The emergence wasn’t magic. It was the predictable output of a structure that held.

A few weeks later I found myself doing the same thing for image generation. Different domain. Different artifacts. Themes. Stillness, endurance, cycles, growth. Archetypes that collapsed hundreds of SKUs into a handful of emotional categories. Variability controls, composition rules, disruption rules. Again, every new layer existed because the previous system broke without it. By the end, a single file could generate coherent campaigns across hundreds of SKUs while still holding the worldview of the brand.

Different domain. Different artifacts. Same operation.

The invariant isn’t the files. The invariant is the layering.

Each layer existed to solve a specific failure mode. Drift. Repetition. Incoherence. Rediscovery work. Taste collapse. The files changed with the domain. The work didn’t.

I thought I’d been managing a content project. I was doing something else.

I’d externalised my taste so the system could hold it without me in the room. The system held my taste. And once it was running, the team started holding it too, through the system.

PRDs describe behaviour to be built. These files described judgment to be applied.

How it happened became the product.

The closest analog is UX design.

UX designers translate user needs and business goals into operational artifacts. Design systems, interaction patterns, component libraries. They maintain coherence across surfaces. Without the design system, the product drifts.

A Thinking Environment Designer translates taste and domain reasoning into operational artifacts an AI can work inside. They define primitives, separate philosophy from overrides, design feedback loops, diagnose drift.

The analogy breaks in one important place. UX designers test against users. The feedback loop is external. Bad UX shows up in usability tests, support tickets, metrics.

Bad thinking environments are harder to detect. A team can operate inside a collapsing system without realising output quality is degrading, because the environment still feels coherent from inside it.

UX has dark patterns. TE will have something worse. Invisible taste collapse.

Nobody has figured out the equivalent of usability testing for thinking environments yet. That’s the kind of open problem disciplines form around.

I could use one.

For external comms, so teams could write in alignment without escalation loops. For engineering onboarding, so new hires wouldn’t have to reverse-engineer worldview from Slack history. For creative systems, so new client work wouldn’t restart from zero every campaign cycle.

I haven’t hired one because the role doesn’t properly exist yet.

But the people probably do. The UX designer who built your design system. The editorial lead who maintained voice across hundreds of pieces. A specific kind of staff PM who stabilised organisational judgment without ever being asked to.

They have a head start.

That’s usually how disciplines begin. The work appears before the title does. Someone notices they could use one. Nobody can hire one yet. A few years later you can’t hire fast enough.

About SG

I run Dobby Ads, an AI Creative Agency. I tend to overthink. This is where that overthinking goes. Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Tongue is the enemy. Stomach and body suffer.

The thought has been with me for years. Cravings as a taste-reward. The mouth wants the next bite before the body has finished registering the last one. By the time the stomach gets to weigh in, the cookie is gone.

I wondered, what if we could make the tongue forget taste? I mean, for a bit.

Gymnema

A little digging brought me to gymnema. Gurmar in Hindi. Sugar-destroyer. A leaf used in Ayurvedic medicine for two thousand years, with a quiet party trick. It binds to the sweet receptors on your tongue and shuts them off for about an hour. You eat the cookie. The cookie tastes like a piece of paper. You stop wanting cookies.

The plant is from India. You can find it as churna, capsule, tea, or raw leaf in any decent ayurvedic shop. What you cannot find here, oddly, is the format I had in my head. The mint. The lozenge. The thing you put on your tongue at the moment the craving arrives, between the meal and the mistake.

It felt like a category waiting to happen. Outside-in instead of inside-out. Not a drug rerouting your hunger hormones. Not a pill working its way through your gut. A lozenge. The mouth, where the craving actually starts.

Almost ten years ago, somebody shipped this. Same mechanism. Same plant. Lozenge, gum, oral spray. A patent. Clinical studies in a peer-reviewed journal. Distribution at Vitamin Shoppe and on Amazon. Bloomberg, Allure, Tim Ferriss. Year: 2018.

I had not heard of them.

A little more digging, to find out what happened. Why it never worked.

GLP-1

Cravings, appetite, the science of why we eat past full, the cultural stigma around willpower, the idea that some people are just biologically louder than others when it comes to food. Mainstream. Everywhere. The cravings conversation is one of the defining wellness stories of this decade.

Ozempic. Wegovy. Mounjaro. Zepbound. The pharmaceutical inside-out path. Today, it is one of the largest drug categories in history, and it dragged the entire cravings conversation with it. Now, when somebody talks about appetite control, they’re talking about gut hormones, satiety signals, and what the brain does after a meal. The mouth has been retired from the discussion. Whether it stays that way is something the next decade gets to decide.

The supplement world followed the wave. Search “natural GLP-1 alternative” today, and you get capsules. Multi-ingredient formulas built to mimic, from the inside, what the injection does. Gymnema is often in the blend, somewhere on the list, alongside other things. The leaf is honored. The format isn’t.

The mechanism that started the conversation became a footnote inside a different formula.

So?

I keep asking myself what to make of this. The shelf had the answer for almost ten years. The wave came. The wave picked the other answer.

Maybe the lozenge format never had a chance because nobody wants to put something bitter in their mouth three times a day. Maybe the taste-receptor frame is too small a story next to “drug that rewires your appetite.” Maybe being early just doesn’t matter when the wave finally arrives, because by the time it arrives, it has decided what it’s looking for.

I didn’t go looking for a category. I went looking for an answer to a problem I couldn’t stop thinking about. I found one. Then I found out the world had already considered it briefly and moved on to something stronger, louder, and more expensive.

If the mouth ever comes back into this conversation, it’ll look like something no one would call a supplement. A piece of dark chocolate that does this. A mint at the end of a meal. A drink. A gum. The mechanism hidden inside a ritual people already have, instead of asking them to add a new one.

The wave will probably crest. The question is whether anyone will be ready when the air shifts, or whether the next person to think about cravings as taste-reward will go through the same loop I just went through, find the same shelf, and write the same post.

Tongue is the enemy. Stomach suffers. Probably. But it doesn’t matter what’s true if the wave decides to lift something else.

About SG

I run Dobby Ads, an AI Creative Agency. I tend to overthink. This is where that overthinking goes. Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Days and weeks since I wrote about the new face of discovery. Still bothers me, like a hunt. I keep going back to AI to push it, and logging my observations as we chase.

It is 2026. ChatGPT came eons ago. Discovery is still where it was.

Researchers across the world must be solving this. It’s too central not to be. And it is not an easy problem, else we would have seen the solution by now.

Or, what if the solution is already at play and we don’t feel it? What if they’re already close to unveiling it?

If they are close, what would they be looking at? What would I be missing?

The Discovery Job

So I went back to my own post and started reading it like a critic.

Here’s the line that didn’t sit right:

“The labor moved. It never disappeared. It just got disguised.”

That’s almost true. It’s also not quite right.

Search’s path is clean.

Each step removed effort. The user did less, the system did more. Always less. Until the user did almost nothing.

Discovery’s path doesn’t move in one direction.

• Town crier: show up at the square, listen. Almost no labor.

• Newspaper: buy it, skim sections. Some labor.

• Radio, TV: sit down. The programmer scheduled. You watched. Less labor than the newspaper.

• Cable, TiVo: more channels, recordable. More labor.

• Facebook, Instagram: open the app, see your friends’ posts.

• TikTok, Reels: open, swipe, judge, swipe, judge, swipe. Hundreds of half-second decisions per session.

Look at that curve.

Discovery’s labor went down, then back up. We didn’t notice because the new version was disguised as leisure.

That’s what I missed.

Discovery had its own arc. It just went the wrong way after we got phones.

The labor went up. That’s the observation. The question is why.

Town crier - the crier picked. Newspaper - the editor picked. Radio, TV - the programmer picked. The 8pm slot was thirty minutes long because someone decided it was thirty minutes long.

Cable came. The programming responsibility started slipping. TiVo finished the slip. Then social media arrived and the slip became a transfer.

Every swipe on TikTok is a programming decision. Pick this video, skip that one, watch the next, drop out at the first second of one that doesn’t grab you. The algorithm presents the menu. You schedule.

That’s the quiet move that broke discovery. Not “the algorithm took over.” The algorithm built the menu. You’re the one running the show.

Don’t Regret Per Minute

I almost published a piece. I didn’t.

The piece was called “Don’t Regret Per Minute.” The argument: TikTok optimizes for “don’t let go” - keep you watching. The new metric should be “don’t regret” - did each minute feel worth it. The architecture: optimize transitions between videos, not individual videos, so each one lands harder than it would alone.

I cooked that idea with AI for days. It felt right. It survived round after round of pressure-testing. I was three small edits from publishing it.

Then I ran the failure-mode test from a piece I wrote recently - “Refusing the shallow version.” Pattern-matching dressed as competence. Closure-seeking under uncertainty. Fake synthesis. Premature commitment dressed as progress. Exit move dressed as helpfulness.

The piece failed three of them.

“Don’t Regret Per Minute” was also prescriptive. It told the user how their session should feel. That’s eat-your-vegetables in a clever costume. A metric that judges the user is a different object from a product spec that describes the system. I had collapsed the two.

The transition-optimization architecture had a manipulation problem at its center. A system that learns “sad video then funny video makes the funny one hit harder” will start engineering the sad video on purpose. That’s just TikTok with better tricks. I’d marked the problem as unresolved and moved on. That’s premature commitment.

And the article tied it all up with two confident lines about who builds the next era. That was the exit move - closure-shaped, so the piece felt done.

I killed the piece.

What survived the chase isn’t a metric. It’s older than that.

The Product Specs

Some things came through every round of pressure-testing.

The product can’t make money by keeping you longer. The moment monetization depends on time-spent, the system drifts back to addiction. That was the original sin of the feed era. Whatever comes next has to monetize differently - fewer impressions worth more, or subscription, or something I haven’t seen yet.

The product is video. Reading takes effort. Audio is passive but slow. Video is the native format of discovery in 2026. That’s not a preference, it’s where attention has consolidated.

The product is free at the edge. Discovery has always been free at the moment of consumption - you didn’t pay the crier, you didn’t pay to turn on the radio, you don’t pay to open Instagram. Money came from somewhere else. Whatever’s next has to honor that.

The product runs on comprehension, not behavior. This is the part of the original post that still holds. Watch time and clicks are proxies. AI that watches video, listens to audio, reads text, and actually understands what’s there - that’s the unlock. Without it, none of this works.

The product is anchored to specific entities you care about. People, places, ideas, builders. The interest graph isn’t broken - platforms weaponized it, but the underlying signal is real.

The product is fresh. Discovery isn’t an archive. Yesterday’s was yesterday’s. Whatever comes next has a recency pulse.

The product is interstitial. It fits in the cracks between other things, the way a newspaper used to. It doesn’t demand its own time slot. You step in, you step out, the world keeps moving.

These don’t tell me what the product is. They tell me what it can’t violate.

So?

What I think is real: someone or something has to start scheduling the moment again. That’s the question. Not “what’s the next feed.” Not “what app replaces Instagram.” But who or what takes the programming job back from the user?

Candidates I keep turning over.

The system itself - comprehending content and your state well enough to deliver a finished thing.

A creator - scheduling for their followers in real time, the way a radio DJ used to.

A small group - the group chat as the new feed, friends scheduling for each other.

A time - daily drop, weekly drop, ends when it ends.

An event in your life - you finished dinner, the system knows, the moment begins.

None of these are answers. They are shapes the question can take.

That’s where I am in April 2026.

The constraints I trust. The diagnosis I trust. The metric I almost committed to, and didn’t. The question still open. Or maybe it is closed, and we haven’t realized it yet.

If you’ve seen further on this, I’d like to hear from you.

About SG

I run Dobby Ads, an AI Creative Agency. I tend to overthink. This is where that overthinking goes. Connect with me on LinkedIn.

I wrote about this on LinkedIn recently. The short version: a client dismissed my well-thought-out work because he couldn’t see the thinking behind it. The output was clean. The reasoning was invisible. He had no way to evaluate what was real and what was assembled with AI.

Neither would I, in his position.

That’s not a client problem. It’s a structural one.

AI systems produce outputs that look the same regardless of the reasoning behind them. A deck built on three weeks of challenged assumptions and rejected directions looks identical to one built in an afternoon on the first plausible path the model offered. Output quality is no longer a signal of reasoning quality. We’ve decoupled them - and we haven’t noticed yet.

The difference shows up later. When the strategy meets the market. When someone asks a question the deck can’t answer. When the assumptions break. The deck that was thought through survives. The one that was assembled doesn’t.

Doctors document differential diagnosis - not just what they concluded, but what they ruled out and why. Engineers document design rationale so the next person can modify the work without invalidating the thinking behind it. Finance has investment memoranda that separate the decision from the reasoning that produced it.

In software, this already has a name. Traces - the record of what happened, in what order, and why. Every serious system has them. Knowledge work still doesn’t.

We haven’t built this for AI-assisted knowledge work. And we’re moving fast enough that the cost is already here - we’re just not accounting for it.

Not a product. Not a platform. A practitioner standard. Five elements. Concise enough to actually use.

The five elements of a Trail:

1. Context used - what inputs and constraints shaped the reasoning.

2. Alternatives considered - what directions were explored and why they were rejected.

3. Assumptions - what has to be true for the output to hold.

4. Points of challenge - where the reasoning was questioned, revised, or contradicted.

5. Confidence and known gaps - where the output is reliable, and where it isn’t.

This is not the model explaining itself. It’s you making the work auditable.

If you're working with AI, you don't have to build this from scratch. The AI was in the room. You can ask it to generate a first version of the trail from your conversation - but treat it as a draft, not ground truth.

Trail should accompany every deck, every strategy, every recommendation that came out of a prompt.

Trail, not certificate. The distinction matters. A certificate asks: Who approved this? A trail asks: Can I follow how you got here?

I don’t know if this makes sense. I just know that afternoon, something was missing.

The work was real. The thinking was real. I just couldn’t prove it.

About SG

I run Dobby Ads, an AI Creative Agency. I tend to overthink. This is where that overthinking goes. Connect with me on LinkedIn.