We are worth more than our .md files. Right? Right?!

I got interested in photography shortly after college. I saved up to buy a camera and started to read up on composition, techniques and editing. This was before Instagram and in those days, photographers shared their work on blogs. One of the first things I noticed was that my pictures didn’t look like anything like the photographers I was following on Blogspot.

In addition to being more interesting and better composed than my own, most professional photos also have a look. The photographers edit their pictures in a way that captures a vibe and their own personal style. Most do this in Lightroom, which was and still is the most popular tool for photographers to manage, edit and export photos. 

One very cool feature in Lightroom is called Presets. Instead of manually sliding contrast and brightness manually on every edit, you can save your most used settings in a Preset. And you can export and sell those Presets to other photographers. This was (and to a degree, still is) a massive deal in the photography world and an important way for photographers to monetize their work as well. They sell their photos but they also sell the way they make their photos.

This feels a lot like what’s happening in marketing right now. Tons of people are turning processes and skills and knowledge into little portable objects that can be saved, exported, reused and shared. Like much of what’s happening in marketing right now, this trend is sort of good, sort of bad and very interesting. 

You are worth more than your .md files. Right? Right?!?

One of the first things most of us did with AI was try to work faster. And the easiest way to do that is to look at a task you do repeatedly and try to automate at least some of it. This is great. It’s fun to take a step back from the work and think about the process. And it’s pretty easy to save yourself some time or maybe even improve the workflow in your first go at this. Faster research, automating handoffs between apps, integrating with your CMS, building synthetic editors—what a win!

That feels so 2023 these days. Now, there’s at least two more steps:

1. The first is that you can turn that workflow into a Claude Skill. Instead of executing a faster workflow, you can just watch the workflow run itself.
2. The next is that you can turn that workflow into a file that can be shared with others. It’s very similar to a Lightroom Preset circa 2013. The knowledge, skills, reasoning, experience and creativity that make what you do valuable can be packaged up into an artifact that can be shared. You can share those artifacts with your team or on social media as a way to educate and/or build your personal brand.

This is kind of wild to me. You can turn any type of work into all kinds of portable objects. Apps, calculators, mind maps, flow charts, Claude skills just to name a few. And the process of doing it forces clarity of thought, which I find to be immensely useful. It makes the knowledge reusable, which is where the big timing savings benefit kicks in.

But here’s where it gets tricky. It’s reusable to you, which helps you work faster. But if you share it, it’s also reusable by other people. And while there’s some value in that, there is risk too.

Working in public used to feel generous. Now it feels complicated.

This is the first time in my career that I’m hesitant to work in public. 

Last year, I had Claude build me a personal style guide, which I shared on LinkedIn. People seemed to think it was interesting but I started to feel a little uncomfortable about it as the comments rolled in.

Anyone could have built the same style guide. All I did was give Claude a few articles I’d written myself and asked it to analyze the writing style and package it up into something I could import as a style in Claude for future writing. It took all of five minutes. And that’s what troubled me. Could the years I spent finding my way as a writer really be boiled down into a single page style guide that anyone could use? Do I have to both do the work and then turn the process into its own product so people remember that I’m a good marketer?

It’s not that the style was so useful that I was automating myself out of job. It’s more that it reduces my experience into a form so simple that I felt sure it was missing something. Do people hire me because I’m Jimmy, a human being with skills and experience and relationships? Or because I’m a compilation of a set of artifacts that makes me a useful cog in an economic machine?

I have to think that photographers must feel the same way about Lightroom Presets. It’s hard to develop your own personal style. It takes years of practice. But if you want a strong online presence in that world, you are forced to at least consider selling them. We marketers don’t yet have a marketplace for this. (Who knows though, I could definitely imagine it.) But artifacts have become a currency for recognition from employers and social media audiences. 

Katie Parrott, writer at Every and recent Superpath AMA guest, shared the above post in the Slack community recently. I had never considered this but she’s absolutely right. We used to share checklists and templates. Now we share Claude Skills as .md files. 

I know, I’m being dramatic. Creating and sharing artifacts is not only cool, but people love this stuff. I find myself clicking on them anytime I see them in a feed or the Superpath Slack. And I see how much engagement people get when they share a good one. I think I’m probably being overly sensitive about protecting my own work from commoditization, but I can’t quite shake the uncomfortable feeling it gives me.

The sum of your artifacts is less than the whole of the parts.

I have a few Claude Skills that I use frequently. I find the process of making them to be fun at times, and depressing at others. I really enjoy stepping back from my day to work, analyzing the task and trying to streamline it. I think there’s a lot of value in doing this for almost every task we do from time to time. That’s the fun part. The part I dislike is feeling like productizing my work to that degree makes it feel like a commodity. 

Am I overreacting? Probably, yes.

I went looking around the photography world to see if there’s been a fallout from the wide sharing and selling of Presets over the years. And interestingly, I didn’t find much. Most people agree that Presets are a good starting point but no one expects that Presets turn bad photos into good ones. Or that by using someone else’s Presets, the buyer somehow chips away at the seller’s ability to turn experience and skill into a good career. 

Honestly, I found this a bit surprising. It feels so similar to the artifact sharing we see in marketing now, but with 15 years of history to learn from. And it turns out that it’s not that big of a deal. I think it’s possible this is such a small part of the AI changes we’re experiencing that it goes mostly unnoticed. 

My work is splitting itself into two buckets these days. One bucket is artifacts. Stuff I do regularly that can be mostly automated. The other is soft skills. The relationships I have with my coworkers and industry peers, my ability to think strategically, and to communicate well. Basically to be the kind of person that others like working with because I get stuff done. 

The latter is more fun, more challenging and I suspect a lot more valuable.