Timelines are bad for creativity
Video editors have timelines.
Music software has timelines.
Animation tools have timelines.
Everything moves left to right, second by second, like a very organised train.
This is great if you already know what you’re making.
It’s terrible if you’re trying to discover it.
A timeline assumes you know what comes next. But creative work rarely happens that way. You jump around. You chase fragments. You go back to something from earlier because suddenly it feels alive.
Imagine writing a song on a timeline from 0:00 to the end. It would be absurd. Songs start as scraps: a melody, a groove, a lyric, a strange sound that feels promising. The timeline only becomes useful later, when you are arranging the thing.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I just built a promo ad entirely by chatting with Claude. It generated the visuals, the voiceover, the music, the whole thing.
Technically it worked.
But creatively, it felt like I could generate it, not mould it.
Because the process was basically: type something into a chat box, wait, see what comes back, repeat. The ideas appear one after another in a vertical scroll. There’s no real way to explore them. No way to shape them. No way to move pieces around and see what happens.
Right now our creative interfaces for AI seem to be three things:
an empty chat box
a workflow canvas full of little connected boxes
or a timeline
None of them feel like a natural place for creative exploration.
What we need are new interfaces that sit somewhere between all three. Something more open than a timeline, more tactile than a chat box, and more human than a workflow canvas full of little connected boxes.
I want to be able to mould AI creations like clay. Push them. Stretch them. Combine them. Pull interesting fragments together and see what happens.
In an AI world, we do not just need better models.
We need better creative tools.
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