Friction as a Feature
emilkowal.ski · 280 words · saved by 1 readers
A natural filter for bad ideas.
We treat friction as something bad. It makes us slow, inefficient, messy. Products brag about removing friction. Entire companies exist just to be “frictionless”. And mostly, that’s right. But friction was quietly doing a second job: it made us think before we built. Before AI, writing code was expensive, so the cost of building imposed a higher threshold on which ideas survived long enough to be built. You had to be selective because the effort itself forced you to decide what was worth making. AI removed that cost. Now an idea can become an app in minutes. So the bar for what’s worth…
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