Be a Potter, Not a Sculptor

When he isn’t wowing art critics or offending prudish school boards, Florence’s most famous David is puzzling anatomists. His right hand is out of proportion, he’s too skinny, and he’s missing a muscle in his back. The main reason for all these flaws is simple: the marble out of which he was carved was a reject, already thinned and lightly sculpted by another artist, and Michaelangelo had to work with what was left, writing to a friend “Mi manco matera” (I lack material). That earlier sculptor’s work had constrained and limited what the master could create. After all, carving stone is purely subtractive–there’s no undo button that puts back the shard you’ve cut away.

Contrast this irreversible, unforgiving process with that of most other artistic disciplines. Oil painters constantly revise their work, adding in or taking out “happy little trees” with abandon. Jazz musicians are always cutting and comping to adjust their performance as it happens. And my favourite example is the potter at her wheel, who can put in and pull out clay at will, shaping and re-shaping the material as it rotates until it’s just right. Unlike the sculptor, the potter uses real-time feedback from her fingers and eyes to make and re-make tiny changes all the time.

If you think about it, most human pursuits are more like pottery than sculpting. For instance, driving, walking, and having a conversation all involve continuous, minute, often subconscious adjustments to match the environment, and recovering from small mistakes is easy and common. In fact, it’s tough to come up with examples of carving-style “one-and-done” activities; ChatGPT and I could only think of donating a kidney, sharing a secret, or jumping out of an airplane.

However the most glaring exception, for most of you, is software development: costly, lengthy, and inevitably late. We’ve got used to being disappointed by our computers and making do with unsound, inadequate applications and the workarounds they require–because, like the sculptor, our digital “chisel strokes” come so infrequently and are so hard to repair that we’d prefer to cover up an error instead of starting again. Two-week sprints and quarterly releases keep our progress glacial and our customers at arm’s length.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. Building software can be as speedy, malleable and feedback-rich as throwing a pot! If you’ve known me for even a short time, you’ll be aware that I’m always teaching organisations to work on their technology in tiny slices, with small, demo-ready, valuable improvements showing up every single day for users to like or hate. That’s just the same as the potter adding a handful of clay, then trying various shapes and curves until she finds one she likes.

And even better, the latest AI tools make this “elephant carpaccio” style of development available to non-experts, including those who don’t code. OpenAI just updated ChatGPT with iterative image generation that remembers the scene you’re editing as you talk about it. This means you can tell it to “have the subjects hug each other” or “move the vase on the table back a bit”, in the same way a photographer would instruct an assistant. And recent “vibe coding” tools give new meaning to the phrase “low code”: you prompt Replit, for example, with a description of the application you want, and the bot codes, checks, and deploys it for you right there in your browser window.

These days, you can’t afford to wait any more than 24 hours to iterate your designs and try out changes to your software with real customers. Which do you want to be: the sluggish sculptor hesitantly working out where to slice next, or the potter next door cranking out jars and jugs and vases by the truckload and learning from every one?

This first appeared in my weekly Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter which is received as part of the Squirrel Squadron every Monday, and was originally posted on 7th April 2025. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/