[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":19},["ShallowReactive",2],{"post-when-reality-gets-cheap":3},{"publishedAt":4,"status":5,"excerpt":6,"content":7,"coverImage":8,"updatedAt":9,"createdAt":10,"postId":11,"tags":12,"title":17,"slug":18},"2026-08-17T16:04:40.689Z","published","What happens when reality becomes cheaper than representation?","I was a little bummed when Marvel introduced the multiverse into the MCU.\n\nOnce there are infinite realities, almost anything becomes possible. Someone dies? There is another version of them somewhere. Something terrible happens? There is a universe where it didn't. A character makes the wrong choice? Somewhere, another version made the right one.\n\nConsequences start to feel a little less consequential.\n\nThe other thing that fascinates me about the multiverse is its scale. I understand the words *infinite universes*, but I don't think my brain can really comprehend what that means.\n\nLately, I've started to feel something similar when I think about AI.\n\nWe usually describe AI productivity in familiar terms: twice as fast, five times faster, ten times the output.\n\nBut at some point, the numbers get large enough that \"doing the same work faster\" stops being the right way to think about it.\n\nThe economics of the work itself start to change.\n\n## We created representations because reality was expensive\n\nI've spent much of my career somewhere between marketing, consulting, design, technology, and product development.\n\nThat means I've created or reviewed a lot of creative briefs, site maps, wireframes, storyboards, use cases, requirements, specifications, design comps, and presentation decks.\n\nMost of these are representations of something that doesn't exist yet.\n\nA creative brief represents a campaign we haven't created. A wireframe represents an experience we haven't built. Requirements represent software that doesn't exist.\n\nTheir purpose was to get what was in everyone's heads into a form we could discuss, refine, and approve before making the much larger investment required to create the real thing.\n\nThat made perfect sense.\n\n**Representation was cheap. Reality was expensive.**\n\nA lot of the process we built around creative and product work was really a way of managing that economic risk.\n\n## Our methodologies reflected the same reality\n\nWaterfall tried to reduce uncertainty before committing to an expensive build.\n\nResearch it. Define it. Document it. Design it. Approve it. Then build it.\n\nThat wasn't just bureaucracy. If building something took a year and cost millions of dollars, discovering halfway through that everyone meant something different was a very expensive problem.\n\nAgile responded to a different risk.\n\nEven if everyone agreed at the beginning, the world could change before you finished. Customers changed. Markets moved. Teams learned things. Assumptions turned out to be wrong.\n\nSo Agile shortened the distance between making something and learning from it.\n\nLean pushed the idea further: don't invest heavily until you've tested the assumptions carrying the most risk.\n\nDifferent methodologies. Different approaches.\n\nBut all of them were shaped by the same underlying assumption:\n\n**Making things had meaningful cost.**\n\nAI is starting to change that.\n\n## What if describing the thing costs almost as much as making it?\n\nThis is the question I keep coming back to:\n\n**What happens when the cost of describing the thing starts approaching the cost of making the thing?**\n\nImagine a product team spending a day writing requirements, creating wireframes, reviewing them, revising them, and documenting acceptance criteria.\n\nWhat if, in roughly that same amount of time, they could create a functioning version and actually use it?\n\nOr a marketing team could spend several days writing a brief, developing concepts, creating comps, reviewing them, and revising them.\n\nWhat if they could instead experience five nearly finished executions?\n\nAt some point, the representation becomes more expensive than the reality it represents.\n\nThat doesn't mean briefs, requirements, wireframes, or prototypes disappear. Some force important thinking, establish constraints, document decisions, or manage real risk.\n\nBut others exist largely because we couldn't afford to create the real thing yet.\n\nSo the question changes from:\n\n*\"Can AI create this deliverable faster?\"*\n\nto:\n\n**\"Why are we creating this deliverable at all?\"**\n\nIf a working experience costs about the same as the wireframe describing it, maybe the working experience becomes the better way to think, communicate, and get feedback.\n\nAnd this is where I come back to the multiverse.\n\nHistorically, we explored possibilities in our heads because reality was expensive. A creative team might consider twenty ideas, present three, and produce one. A product team might debate ten approaches, prototype two, and build one.\n\nAI changes more than the cost of building that one reality.\n\nIt changes how many realities we can afford to explore.\n\nWhat happens when one idea can become ten functioning experiences? Or fifty campaigns? Or a hundred different versions of a product, workflow, or system?\n\nNot a hundred descriptions.\n\n**A hundred realities we can actually experience, compare, test, and learn from.**\n\nThat's the part of AI productivity I don't think we've begun to wrap our heads around. Like the multiverse, the scale eventually becomes hard to comprehend.\n\n**We used to think through a hundred possibilities so we could afford to build one. What happens when we can afford to build the hundred?**","https://ericnparadis-com-prod-mediabucketbucket-baexchhz.s3.amazonaws.com/media/c110b46e-e952-4de5-a17c-8707798183cc.png","2026-08-17T16:12:45.392Z","2026-08-17T16:04:40.691Z","6bea2987-c5ba-4bdb-8375-6838bfbc59ed",[13,14,15,16],"Agile","Lean","Waterfall","Vision Explore Fit","When Reality Gets Cheap","when-reality-gets-cheap",1786983330173]