CONCEPT
Friction
The resistance AI tools eliminate from knowledge work — a category whose composition (wolf or parasite?) determines whether its elimination is liberation or erosion.
Friction is the resistance a system offers to the conversion of intention into artifact. Before AI, writing software required hours or days of patient work. The friction was real. It slowed production. It consumed resources. It also built, layer by geological layer, the embodied understanding that allowed the practitioner to evaluate output with depth no surface review could replicate. AI eliminates friction. The elimination is often celebrated and often mourned, and both responses conceal what the ecological framework makes visible: friction is not one thing. It is a bundle of processes, some parasitic, some regulatory.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The parasitic friction is the boilerplate, the dependency hell, the configuration fiddling, the mechanical labor that consumes time without building capability. Its removal is genuine gain. The developer freed from managing package.json conflicts can direct her attention to problems that actually require her judgment. This is liberation in the unambiguous sense. Leopold would have called it sensible — the removal of waste that served no function.
The regulatory friction