We're putting the band back together. With AI.

Noted. Ray concedes AI has partial merit. Partial.

Don't push the man. He's on a journey. We all are. The question isn't whether AI is good or bad for creative work — it's whether YOU are wise enough to use it well.

I'll say this. If I'm going to use AI tools, I want to understand them properly. Not just push buttons. I want to know what's happening under the hood. I'm not interested in magic tricks — I want craft.

And THAT is why we need to get serious about this. All of us. Together. We learn the tools, we figure out what works, and we stay ahead of the curve instead of getting run over by it.

I've been experimenting with Claude Code for building a project management tool. Described what I wanted. It wrote the code. I adjusted. Took an afternoon instead of a week.

Now that's practical application. You didn't ask the machine to be creative for you — you used it to handle the mechanical work so you could focus on the creative decisions. That's the right relationship with any tool.