Make Something Heavy

The modern world is fueled by mass appeal, addicted to speed, thrives on spikes, scrolls and screenshots. It resists weight and avoids friction. It does not care for patience, deliberation, or anything but production.

It doesn’t care what you create, only that you keep creating. Make more. Make faster. Make lighter. (Make slop if you have to.) Make something that can be consumed in a breath and discarded just as quickly. Heavy things take time. And here, time is a tax. And so, we oblige—everyone does.

We create more than ever, but it weighs nothing.

AI now promises results without the reckoning, but frictionless creation leads to weightless rewards. No one dreams of merely pushing a button to generate their magnum opus. The output matters, but the intention, the struggle, the care is what makes it count — what gives it weight.¹

Of course, there’s a range from light to heavy, and not all light things are bad. An entire economy thrives on lightness. Memes, breaking news, and celebrity drama shape culture in spades. But movement isn’t meaning. A million views doesn’t make a pound of significance. Light things shape culture, but rarely shape us.

Creation isn’t just about output. It’s a process of becoming. The best work shapes the maker as much as the audience. A founder builds a startup to prove they can. A writer wrestles an idea into clarity. You don’t just create heavy things. You become someone who can.

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The section above, is taken from the article Make Something Heavy

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the concept of making something heavy. About six months ago I joined a startup, as the 7th employee (3rd engineer), at the very inception of its R&D, and now I’m starting to grasp the idea of making something heavy. I think that without the experience of working in a startup, from 0 (hopefully we will get to 1 in the near future)² I couldn’t have reached this understanding. Or maybe, to phrase it a bit differently, I would have had a much harder time reaching this understanding.

In the current era of AI being the predominant player in creation, it feels like everyone is adopting the title “Creator”, and in the context of making software, I see a lot of “CEO’s” that are running a software, created by vibe coding using ai. There are some success stories here and there, and those stories give the impression that software, or if I’m being more accurate, heavy software, can be “vibe coded”.³

You don’t feel like a true creator because you haven’t made anything heavy, and deep down, you know light things don’t count. Your output is high, but your imprint is low. You ship, but you do not build. You call yourself a creator, but what have you made that could survive a month offline? A year? A decade? If you stopped posting tomorrow, would anything remain? Creating for 24-hour cycles isn’t freedom, leverage, or legacy—it’s just renting out your time.

The truth is, that making something heavy, something that you can’t scroll your way out of simply by swiping up, is a very challenging, iterative road. It can be done solely, alone, but when it is done with a team of great, like-minded people, the challenge is much more manageable. And even fun, if I may say.

It can be done using AI, but you need to control the AI and not let it control you. This is something I found myself doing. It took me quite some time to notice it, but eventually I figured that letting the LLMs take control over your work is making the heavy thing you are trying to build too heavy. And before you notice, you don’t know what’s happening anymore.

Once I figured that out, the first thing I did was leave Cursor. I still use its AI features through the cursor-agent CLI, but in Plan Mode only.⁴ I also use other AI products, but only to support my work and not do it for me. If you let it take over, you’re hurting your work and your team.

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Footnotes

1. AI making things easier to create and easier to disrupt of course brings value into question too, not only at the outset but over the long-term. AI largely breaks moats and wipes out the middle. ↩

2. Zero to One, read it if you haven’t ↩

3. vibe coding ↩

4. Plan Mode is a feature where the AI proposes changes for your review before executing them, keeping you in control of decision-making rather than automatically accepting changes. ↩