CONCEPT
Wolf vs. Parasite
The diagnostic distinction between friction that regulates the system and friction that merely drags on it — the specifically difficult ecological judgment the AI moment demands.
Thinking like a mountain does not mean opposing the removal of all friction. The wolf analogy is specific. Not all friction is productive. Not all inefficiency serves a function. The boilerplate code that consumes hours of a developer's time without building any understanding is not a wolf. It is a parasite. Its removal genuinely improves the ecosystem's health. The challenge — the specifically difficult challenge mountain thinking illuminates — is distinguishing the parasite from the regulator when both look, from the seasonal perspective, like costs to be eliminated.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The wolf looked like a cost to the rancher. It ate calves. Its removal produced clear short-term gains. Only on the mountain's timescale did the wolf's regulatory function become visible: controlling the deer population that controlled the vegetation that held the soil that fed the streams. The wolf was performing work the accounting system did not capture. Its elimination unleashed a cascade the ranchers had not anticipated because they had not