The Friction Paradox: Why AI's Efficiency Might Be Stifling Innovation
Everyone's talking about AI's ability to get products to market faster. Generate 50 logo concepts in minutes. Write copy at lightning speed. Design entire interfaces with a simple prompt. The promise? Maximum efficiency, minimum effort.
But here's what everyone's missing: friction isn't the enemy of good design—it's the catalyst.
I still remember when my college design professor tasked us with creating 100 logo concepts based on a brief. Pick your favorite. Now create 100 variations of that one concept. The collective groan from the class was audible. We thought he was being sadistic.
Turns out, he was being brilliant.
The Magic Happens in Iteration 73
Those first 20 concepts? They were obvious. Safe. The same solutions every designer reaches for when they're comfortable. By concept 50, we were getting frustrated. Our usual tricks weren't working anymore.
But, somewhere around iteration 73, something shifted. We had exhausted our default patterns. We were forced to think differently, to push beyond what felt natural, to explore territory we'd never considered.
The best solutions—the ones that made us stop and say "oh, that's interesting"—came when we had no choice but to dig deeper.
AI Removes the Struggle (And That's the Problem)
Today's AI tools promise to eliminate this struggle entirely. Why push through 100 iterations when AI can generate endless variations instantly?
Because the struggle is where the breakthrough lives.
When we remove friction from the creative process, we optimize for speed over depth. We get competent solutions faster, but we miss the unexpected discoveries that come from being forced to think beyond our first instincts. It is that struggle that leads to real problem solving. AI predicts what will come next based on what has already been, but true innovators see beyond that to something completely new.
At hili, we're building a platform for trusted recommendations. The easy path would be using AI to generate more content, faster. The better path requires struggling to synthesize thousands of inputs and signals in order to deeply understand how trust is actually built between real people and translate that into a digital experience that reinforces that trust in a way that feels completely natural.
The Right Kind of Friction
Don't get me wrong—AI is incredibly powerful. But the smartest designers and founders aren't using it to eliminate creative struggle. They're using it to eliminate busy work so they can spend more time in the productive friction zone.
Here's the difference:
Friction that helps: Multiple iterations, challenging assumptions, testing uncomfortable ideas
Friction that hurts: Repetitive tasks, technical limitations, administrative overhead
The goal isn't to make everything efficient. It's to choose your friction, and where you invest your time, wisely.
What 100 Logo Comps Taught Me About Building Companies
That brutal assignment taught me something that goes far beyond design: breakthrough solutions require pushing past your comfort zone repeatedly.
In building hili, we could use AI to quickly generate features that look like every other recommendation platform. Or we can embrace the process of deeply understanding why people trust certain recommendations and not others—even when that means more iterations, more testing, more time in the uncomfortable space of not knowing.
The companies that will define the next decade won't be the ones that eliminated friction fastest. They'll be the ones that put in the work where it counted and pushed through it to find something genuinely new.
Your first idea is rarely your best idea. Your 73rd might be revolutionary.
“Breakthrough solutions require pushing past your comfort zone repeatedly.”