CONCEPT
The Good-Enough Machine
Phillips's design principle, drawn from Winnicott's good-enough mother: the ideal AI tool is not the seamless one but the one that preserves enough friction to sustain the user's creative development.
Winnicott's good-enough mother is neither perfectly responsive nor negligently absent. She provides enough frustration for the infant to develop its own capacities without providing so much that the infant is overwhelmed. Phillips proposes the good-enough machine as an analogous ideal for AI tool design. The perfect machine — the one that anticipates every need and fulfills every desire before it is articulated — is not good enough; it is too good, depriving the user of the frustration that is the precondition for creative development. The negligent machine, which fails constantly, is too poor. The good-enough machine provides enough capability to support the creator's ambition while preserving enough friction to sustain the playing that is the source of all genuine creation.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The argument cuts directly against the dominant direction of AI tool development, which has been organized around the elimination of friction. Seamlessness is treated as an unqualified virtue. The model that requires