of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
“Constraints lead to better creative output.”
Just before Easter 2025, I visited the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. Despite living right across the street for four years, I never stepped inside it. I joined a guided tour, as I often do at historic landmarks, hoping to hear the stories behind the stone.
As we stood before the altar, the guide pointed upward toward an awe-inspiring mosaic of the Virgin Mary—Oranta. More than 20 feet tall, covering 2,799 square feet, and composed of more than nine million minuscule glass cubes, it fills the dome with a timeless, almost overwhelming presence.
Let that sink in:
A mosaic spanning a 100-foot dome.
No cranes. No CAD software.
Just time, vision, and mastery.
These constraints were the catalyst for great, even historic, creative results back then. The dome, the lack of tools, the fragile materials—all of these limitations demanded ingenuity. That pressure produced beauty that still holds power a thousand years later.
Today, I can generate an image of myself as a porcelain doll in under a minute.
A high-quality creative output, customized to my wants, needs, and requirements…developed in less than a minute.
With speed becoming the new standard, and technology essentially eliminating creative limitations, we must now ask ourselves:
What are the new constraints—and why do we need them?
Orchestration Over Construction
There's a deeper parallel in this mosaic that illuminates our present moment. Those ancient artisans weren't merely placing colored glass—they were orchestrating thousands of individual components into a unified vision. Each cube, unremarkable on its own, became transcendent through intentional arrangement.
This mirrors the evolution of our technological processes. Where teams once assembled pre-created packages into cohesive wholes—whether architectural elements, consumer packaged goods, or software libraries—we now orchestrate agents, prompts, and models in the same way.
The individual pieces aren't placed manually; they're directed through intention, vision, and taste This shift from construction to orchestration doesn't diminish creativity—it elevates it to a higher plane of abstraction.
But, we’ve been here before.
History tells us that every technological leap begins with excitement—and ends with a return to essence. Concrete gave us cities. Synthetic fabrics gave us mass fashion. The internet gave us access to all the knowledge we could possibly want (or need). Now, AI has given us scale, speed, and automation.
But as we gain capabilities, we also yearn for friction. From brutalism back to biophilic design. From fast fashion to upcycled heirlooms. The pendulum always swings back.
Today, everyone is a writer, designer, strategist, and developer—with the right prompt and the right AI assistant, that is. That’s progress. But it also reframes our earlier question to focus on our potential influence and impact in the modern world:
What role do humans play in an AI-powered world?
In 2003, Eric Evans published Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. His premise? Build software around real-world business needs. When I began working as a project manager in 2016, this was gospel. Requirements first, code second.
Fast-forward to 2025: we have AI copilots, prompt engineers, and "vibe coding" sessions. Yet the principle remains:Software is business logic made digital. Whether you’re coding in Turbo Pascal or building with Copilot and Cursor, tools evolve. But fundamentals remain.
Better tools don’t replace professionals. They raise the bar while also redefining what professionalism is.
Focusing solely on tools assumes efficiency is the only metric. But ironically, the more sophisticated the tool, the less it differentiates you. It’s no longer a skill to know how to read, use Microsoft Word, or code in React.
One Insiders article described this aptly in the context of eCommerce UX:
“Most eCommerce websites I see are designed like the emergency exits on a plane: the only goal is to make sure that people, even under a shock, will find their way out.”
You can build that exit with AI today. But you can’t build meaning, emotion, or resonance—at least not yet.
What we're witnessing is nothing less than an inversion of value hierarchies. When anyone can generate functionally competent code, designs, or copy, the sacred quality becomes the human intention behind these artifacts.
Walter Benjamin wrote of art's "aura"—that ineffable quality that comes from its unique existence in time and space. In our age of mechanical—and now algorithmic—reproduction, this aura doesn't disappear; it relocates to the realm of intention. The question shifts from "How was this made?" to "Why was this made?" and "Who envisioned this?"
The new scarcity isn't technical capability but meaningful provenance—the authentic reason for something's existence beyond mere utility or profit.
Tools Enhance. They Don’t Originate.
Adobe’s GenStudio is a compelling case. Because while it enables marketers to rapidly scale performance content, it requires original creative to successfully power the machine.
Put more simply and directly, without strong ideas, AI merely accelerates failure and creates mediocre results. And with most eCommerce sites drowning in a sea of sameness—and consumers struggling to be inspired by them—mediocrity simply isn’t an option.
The same risks (and rewards) apply to startups. You can now build a full-stack MVP in days. But unless your idea, positioning, and message are sharp, AI will just get you to irrelevance faster.
From Four Years to Two Weeks
In 2018, launching an idea like “Airbnb for pets” meant years of development, testing, and marketing before likely failure. Today, the same cycle takes two weeks.
AI writes your code, builds your landing page, and emails your beta testers.
It’s magic. But also a trap.
Speed is no longer the bottleneck. But without constraints, every idea competes on the same saturated playing field.
Fewer constraints = faster launches = higher failure rates.
Which brings us to the real point: the new constraint is you. When technology stops being the constraint, the new limiting factor is… human. Not in a limiting sense—rather, in a clarifying one.
The constraint now is:
- Your ideas
- Your taste
- Your perspective
- Your ability to translate culture into product
If you have nothing original to say, the AI can’t say it for you.
A remarkable example comes from October 2022, when Ukrainian jewelry brand Sova launched a bracelet. A simple design, with each design made from five grams of a particular steel. Steel is an ultra-strong and durable alloy that can be remelted many times without losing its properties. The bracelets are made from steel produced on the legendary rolling mill 3600.
This very steel was used in 1981 to build a launch shaft for a spacecraft, and in 2012, for the new sarcophagus at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. In 2022, the rolling shop where the 3600 mill operated became a steel fortress where defenders of Ukraine heroically held the line.
That story made the product sell out in days. It’s not just about making a steel bracelet (we are not in the steel age after all). It’s about the idea, the myth, and the lore behind the steel bracelet.
This is what AI cannot generate: origin stories that matter.
Ideas Are the Scarcity
AI will fix your grammar.
AI will refine your layout.
AI will run your A/B tests.
But it will not give you a reason for your product to exist.
Or even a reason for your brand to exist.
The differentiator is no longer technical competence.
It’s originality. Authenticity. Human relevance.
This is your new brief:
Don’t just build faster. Build with intention.
The Sova bracelet illuminates something profound about modern commerce: as implementation barriers fall, the unified vision of a singular tastemaker becomes disproportionately valuable.
In software development and brand building, we've witnessed the siloization of product development—data-driven decisions fragmenting the customer experience into optimized but disconnected touchpoints. The result is functional but soulless commerce that fails to resonate at a deeper level.
Yet AI now makes it trivial for smaller teams, even individuals, to orchestrate changes of remarkable scale and grandeur. What emerges is the possibility to envision how thousands of individual touchpoints converge into a coherent, meaningful whole. Like the Oranta mosaic's artisans working from a unified vision, brands require a clear intentionality that transcends their individual components.
The most compelling commerce experiences of the coming decade won't be those with the most sophisticated algorithms, but those with the most coherent human vision orchestrating these algorithms toward meaningful ends.
Final Thoughts
If the last decade was about digital scale, the next will be about human signal.
Constraints haven’t gone away. They’ve just changed shape.
The new constraint is not a lack of tools, platforms, or capital. It’s what you believe. What you want to build. What story you want to leave behind.
Oranta still shines above the altar of Saint Sophia.
What will your mosaic be?
Oleksii (Alex) Lunkov is a digital commerce consultant and Fractional Chief E-Commerce Officer. He’s led transformation initiatives for brands like Wimbledon and Berry Bros. & Rudd, translating cultural heritage into digital performance. Today, he works with luxury and fashion clients such as Zielinski & Rozen, helping them find clarity in the chaos of modern commerce.
“Constraints lead to better creative output.”
Just before Easter 2025, I visited the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. Despite living right across the street for four years, I never stepped inside it. I joined a guided tour, as I often do at historic landmarks, hoping to hear the stories behind the stone.
As we stood before the altar, the guide pointed upward toward an awe-inspiring mosaic of the Virgin Mary—Oranta. More than 20 feet tall, covering 2,799 square feet, and composed of more than nine million minuscule glass cubes, it fills the dome with a timeless, almost overwhelming presence.
Let that sink in:
A mosaic spanning a 100-foot dome.
No cranes. No CAD software.
Just time, vision, and mastery.
These constraints were the catalyst for great, even historic, creative results back then. The dome, the lack of tools, the fragile materials—all of these limitations demanded ingenuity. That pressure produced beauty that still holds power a thousand years later.
Today, I can generate an image of myself as a porcelain doll in under a minute.
A high-quality creative output, customized to my wants, needs, and requirements…developed in less than a minute.
With speed becoming the new standard, and technology essentially eliminating creative limitations, we must now ask ourselves:
What are the new constraints—and why do we need them?
Orchestration Over Construction
There's a deeper parallel in this mosaic that illuminates our present moment. Those ancient artisans weren't merely placing colored glass—they were orchestrating thousands of individual components into a unified vision. Each cube, unremarkable on its own, became transcendent through intentional arrangement.
This mirrors the evolution of our technological processes. Where teams once assembled pre-created packages into cohesive wholes—whether architectural elements, consumer packaged goods, or software libraries—we now orchestrate agents, prompts, and models in the same way.
The individual pieces aren't placed manually; they're directed through intention, vision, and taste This shift from construction to orchestration doesn't diminish creativity—it elevates it to a higher plane of abstraction.
But, we’ve been here before.
History tells us that every technological leap begins with excitement—and ends with a return to essence. Concrete gave us cities. Synthetic fabrics gave us mass fashion. The internet gave us access to all the knowledge we could possibly want (or need). Now, AI has given us scale, speed, and automation.
But as we gain capabilities, we also yearn for friction. From brutalism back to biophilic design. From fast fashion to upcycled heirlooms. The pendulum always swings back.
Today, everyone is a writer, designer, strategist, and developer—with the right prompt and the right AI assistant, that is. That’s progress. But it also reframes our earlier question to focus on our potential influence and impact in the modern world:
What role do humans play in an AI-powered world?
In 2003, Eric Evans published Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. His premise? Build software around real-world business needs. When I began working as a project manager in 2016, this was gospel. Requirements first, code second.
Fast-forward to 2025: we have AI copilots, prompt engineers, and "vibe coding" sessions. Yet the principle remains:Software is business logic made digital. Whether you’re coding in Turbo Pascal or building with Copilot and Cursor, tools evolve. But fundamentals remain.
Better tools don’t replace professionals. They raise the bar while also redefining what professionalism is.
Focusing solely on tools assumes efficiency is the only metric. But ironically, the more sophisticated the tool, the less it differentiates you. It’s no longer a skill to know how to read, use Microsoft Word, or code in React.
One Insiders article described this aptly in the context of eCommerce UX:
“Most eCommerce websites I see are designed like the emergency exits on a plane: the only goal is to make sure that people, even under a shock, will find their way out.”
You can build that exit with AI today. But you can’t build meaning, emotion, or resonance—at least not yet.
What we're witnessing is nothing less than an inversion of value hierarchies. When anyone can generate functionally competent code, designs, or copy, the sacred quality becomes the human intention behind these artifacts.
Walter Benjamin wrote of art's "aura"—that ineffable quality that comes from its unique existence in time and space. In our age of mechanical—and now algorithmic—reproduction, this aura doesn't disappear; it relocates to the realm of intention. The question shifts from "How was this made?" to "Why was this made?" and "Who envisioned this?"
The new scarcity isn't technical capability but meaningful provenance—the authentic reason for something's existence beyond mere utility or profit.
Tools Enhance. They Don’t Originate.
Adobe’s GenStudio is a compelling case. Because while it enables marketers to rapidly scale performance content, it requires original creative to successfully power the machine.
Put more simply and directly, without strong ideas, AI merely accelerates failure and creates mediocre results. And with most eCommerce sites drowning in a sea of sameness—and consumers struggling to be inspired by them—mediocrity simply isn’t an option.
The same risks (and rewards) apply to startups. You can now build a full-stack MVP in days. But unless your idea, positioning, and message are sharp, AI will just get you to irrelevance faster.
From Four Years to Two Weeks
In 2018, launching an idea like “Airbnb for pets” meant years of development, testing, and marketing before likely failure. Today, the same cycle takes two weeks.
AI writes your code, builds your landing page, and emails your beta testers.
It’s magic. But also a trap.
Speed is no longer the bottleneck. But without constraints, every idea competes on the same saturated playing field.
Fewer constraints = faster launches = higher failure rates.
Which brings us to the real point: the new constraint is you. When technology stops being the constraint, the new limiting factor is… human. Not in a limiting sense—rather, in a clarifying one.
The constraint now is:
- Your ideas
- Your taste
- Your perspective
- Your ability to translate culture into product
If you have nothing original to say, the AI can’t say it for you.
A remarkable example comes from October 2022, when Ukrainian jewelry brand Sova launched a bracelet. A simple design, with each design made from five grams of a particular steel. Steel is an ultra-strong and durable alloy that can be remelted many times without losing its properties. The bracelets are made from steel produced on the legendary rolling mill 3600.
This very steel was used in 1981 to build a launch shaft for a spacecraft, and in 2012, for the new sarcophagus at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. In 2022, the rolling shop where the 3600 mill operated became a steel fortress where defenders of Ukraine heroically held the line.
That story made the product sell out in days. It’s not just about making a steel bracelet (we are not in the steel age after all). It’s about the idea, the myth, and the lore behind the steel bracelet.
This is what AI cannot generate: origin stories that matter.
Ideas Are the Scarcity
AI will fix your grammar.
AI will refine your layout.
AI will run your A/B tests.
But it will not give you a reason for your product to exist.
Or even a reason for your brand to exist.
The differentiator is no longer technical competence.
It’s originality. Authenticity. Human relevance.
This is your new brief:
Don’t just build faster. Build with intention.
The Sova bracelet illuminates something profound about modern commerce: as implementation barriers fall, the unified vision of a singular tastemaker becomes disproportionately valuable.
In software development and brand building, we've witnessed the siloization of product development—data-driven decisions fragmenting the customer experience into optimized but disconnected touchpoints. The result is functional but soulless commerce that fails to resonate at a deeper level.
Yet AI now makes it trivial for smaller teams, even individuals, to orchestrate changes of remarkable scale and grandeur. What emerges is the possibility to envision how thousands of individual touchpoints converge into a coherent, meaningful whole. Like the Oranta mosaic's artisans working from a unified vision, brands require a clear intentionality that transcends their individual components.
The most compelling commerce experiences of the coming decade won't be those with the most sophisticated algorithms, but those with the most coherent human vision orchestrating these algorithms toward meaningful ends.
Final Thoughts
If the last decade was about digital scale, the next will be about human signal.
Constraints haven’t gone away. They’ve just changed shape.
The new constraint is not a lack of tools, platforms, or capital. It’s what you believe. What you want to build. What story you want to leave behind.
Oranta still shines above the altar of Saint Sophia.
What will your mosaic be?
Oleksii (Alex) Lunkov is a digital commerce consultant and Fractional Chief E-Commerce Officer. He’s led transformation initiatives for brands like Wimbledon and Berry Bros. & Rudd, translating cultural heritage into digital performance. Today, he works with luxury and fashion clients such as Zielinski & Rozen, helping them find clarity in the chaos of modern commerce.
“Constraints lead to better creative output.”
Just before Easter 2025, I visited the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. Despite living right across the street for four years, I never stepped inside it. I joined a guided tour, as I often do at historic landmarks, hoping to hear the stories behind the stone.
As we stood before the altar, the guide pointed upward toward an awe-inspiring mosaic of the Virgin Mary—Oranta. More than 20 feet tall, covering 2,799 square feet, and composed of more than nine million minuscule glass cubes, it fills the dome with a timeless, almost overwhelming presence.
Let that sink in:
A mosaic spanning a 100-foot dome.
No cranes. No CAD software.
Just time, vision, and mastery.
These constraints were the catalyst for great, even historic, creative results back then. The dome, the lack of tools, the fragile materials—all of these limitations demanded ingenuity. That pressure produced beauty that still holds power a thousand years later.
Today, I can generate an image of myself as a porcelain doll in under a minute.
A high-quality creative output, customized to my wants, needs, and requirements…developed in less than a minute.
With speed becoming the new standard, and technology essentially eliminating creative limitations, we must now ask ourselves:
What are the new constraints—and why do we need them?
Orchestration Over Construction
There's a deeper parallel in this mosaic that illuminates our present moment. Those ancient artisans weren't merely placing colored glass—they were orchestrating thousands of individual components into a unified vision. Each cube, unremarkable on its own, became transcendent through intentional arrangement.
This mirrors the evolution of our technological processes. Where teams once assembled pre-created packages into cohesive wholes—whether architectural elements, consumer packaged goods, or software libraries—we now orchestrate agents, prompts, and models in the same way.
The individual pieces aren't placed manually; they're directed through intention, vision, and taste This shift from construction to orchestration doesn't diminish creativity—it elevates it to a higher plane of abstraction.
But, we’ve been here before.
History tells us that every technological leap begins with excitement—and ends with a return to essence. Concrete gave us cities. Synthetic fabrics gave us mass fashion. The internet gave us access to all the knowledge we could possibly want (or need). Now, AI has given us scale, speed, and automation.
But as we gain capabilities, we also yearn for friction. From brutalism back to biophilic design. From fast fashion to upcycled heirlooms. The pendulum always swings back.
Today, everyone is a writer, designer, strategist, and developer—with the right prompt and the right AI assistant, that is. That’s progress. But it also reframes our earlier question to focus on our potential influence and impact in the modern world:
What role do humans play in an AI-powered world?
In 2003, Eric Evans published Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. His premise? Build software around real-world business needs. When I began working as a project manager in 2016, this was gospel. Requirements first, code second.
Fast-forward to 2025: we have AI copilots, prompt engineers, and "vibe coding" sessions. Yet the principle remains:Software is business logic made digital. Whether you’re coding in Turbo Pascal or building with Copilot and Cursor, tools evolve. But fundamentals remain.
Better tools don’t replace professionals. They raise the bar while also redefining what professionalism is.
Focusing solely on tools assumes efficiency is the only metric. But ironically, the more sophisticated the tool, the less it differentiates you. It’s no longer a skill to know how to read, use Microsoft Word, or code in React.
One Insiders article described this aptly in the context of eCommerce UX:
“Most eCommerce websites I see are designed like the emergency exits on a plane: the only goal is to make sure that people, even under a shock, will find their way out.”
You can build that exit with AI today. But you can’t build meaning, emotion, or resonance—at least not yet.
What we're witnessing is nothing less than an inversion of value hierarchies. When anyone can generate functionally competent code, designs, or copy, the sacred quality becomes the human intention behind these artifacts.
Walter Benjamin wrote of art's "aura"—that ineffable quality that comes from its unique existence in time and space. In our age of mechanical—and now algorithmic—reproduction, this aura doesn't disappear; it relocates to the realm of intention. The question shifts from "How was this made?" to "Why was this made?" and "Who envisioned this?"
The new scarcity isn't technical capability but meaningful provenance—the authentic reason for something's existence beyond mere utility or profit.
Tools Enhance. They Don’t Originate.
Adobe’s GenStudio is a compelling case. Because while it enables marketers to rapidly scale performance content, it requires original creative to successfully power the machine.
Put more simply and directly, without strong ideas, AI merely accelerates failure and creates mediocre results. And with most eCommerce sites drowning in a sea of sameness—and consumers struggling to be inspired by them—mediocrity simply isn’t an option.
The same risks (and rewards) apply to startups. You can now build a full-stack MVP in days. But unless your idea, positioning, and message are sharp, AI will just get you to irrelevance faster.
From Four Years to Two Weeks
In 2018, launching an idea like “Airbnb for pets” meant years of development, testing, and marketing before likely failure. Today, the same cycle takes two weeks.
AI writes your code, builds your landing page, and emails your beta testers.
It’s magic. But also a trap.
Speed is no longer the bottleneck. But without constraints, every idea competes on the same saturated playing field.
Fewer constraints = faster launches = higher failure rates.
Which brings us to the real point: the new constraint is you. When technology stops being the constraint, the new limiting factor is… human. Not in a limiting sense—rather, in a clarifying one.
The constraint now is:
- Your ideas
- Your taste
- Your perspective
- Your ability to translate culture into product
If you have nothing original to say, the AI can’t say it for you.
A remarkable example comes from October 2022, when Ukrainian jewelry brand Sova launched a bracelet. A simple design, with each design made from five grams of a particular steel. Steel is an ultra-strong and durable alloy that can be remelted many times without losing its properties. The bracelets are made from steel produced on the legendary rolling mill 3600.
This very steel was used in 1981 to build a launch shaft for a spacecraft, and in 2012, for the new sarcophagus at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. In 2022, the rolling shop where the 3600 mill operated became a steel fortress where defenders of Ukraine heroically held the line.
That story made the product sell out in days. It’s not just about making a steel bracelet (we are not in the steel age after all). It’s about the idea, the myth, and the lore behind the steel bracelet.
This is what AI cannot generate: origin stories that matter.
Ideas Are the Scarcity
AI will fix your grammar.
AI will refine your layout.
AI will run your A/B tests.
But it will not give you a reason for your product to exist.
Or even a reason for your brand to exist.
The differentiator is no longer technical competence.
It’s originality. Authenticity. Human relevance.
This is your new brief:
Don’t just build faster. Build with intention.
The Sova bracelet illuminates something profound about modern commerce: as implementation barriers fall, the unified vision of a singular tastemaker becomes disproportionately valuable.
In software development and brand building, we've witnessed the siloization of product development—data-driven decisions fragmenting the customer experience into optimized but disconnected touchpoints. The result is functional but soulless commerce that fails to resonate at a deeper level.
Yet AI now makes it trivial for smaller teams, even individuals, to orchestrate changes of remarkable scale and grandeur. What emerges is the possibility to envision how thousands of individual touchpoints converge into a coherent, meaningful whole. Like the Oranta mosaic's artisans working from a unified vision, brands require a clear intentionality that transcends their individual components.
The most compelling commerce experiences of the coming decade won't be those with the most sophisticated algorithms, but those with the most coherent human vision orchestrating these algorithms toward meaningful ends.
Final Thoughts
If the last decade was about digital scale, the next will be about human signal.
Constraints haven’t gone away. They’ve just changed shape.
The new constraint is not a lack of tools, platforms, or capital. It’s what you believe. What you want to build. What story you want to leave behind.
Oranta still shines above the altar of Saint Sophia.
What will your mosaic be?
Oleksii (Alex) Lunkov is a digital commerce consultant and Fractional Chief E-Commerce Officer. He’s led transformation initiatives for brands like Wimbledon and Berry Bros. & Rudd, translating cultural heritage into digital performance. Today, he works with luxury and fashion clients such as Zielinski & Rozen, helping them find clarity in the chaos of modern commerce.
“Constraints lead to better creative output.”
Just before Easter 2025, I visited the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. Despite living right across the street for four years, I never stepped inside it. I joined a guided tour, as I often do at historic landmarks, hoping to hear the stories behind the stone.
As we stood before the altar, the guide pointed upward toward an awe-inspiring mosaic of the Virgin Mary—Oranta. More than 20 feet tall, covering 2,799 square feet, and composed of more than nine million minuscule glass cubes, it fills the dome with a timeless, almost overwhelming presence.
Let that sink in:
A mosaic spanning a 100-foot dome.
No cranes. No CAD software.
Just time, vision, and mastery.
These constraints were the catalyst for great, even historic, creative results back then. The dome, the lack of tools, the fragile materials—all of these limitations demanded ingenuity. That pressure produced beauty that still holds power a thousand years later.
Today, I can generate an image of myself as a porcelain doll in under a minute.
A high-quality creative output, customized to my wants, needs, and requirements…developed in less than a minute.
With speed becoming the new standard, and technology essentially eliminating creative limitations, we must now ask ourselves:
What are the new constraints—and why do we need them?
Orchestration Over Construction
There's a deeper parallel in this mosaic that illuminates our present moment. Those ancient artisans weren't merely placing colored glass—they were orchestrating thousands of individual components into a unified vision. Each cube, unremarkable on its own, became transcendent through intentional arrangement.
This mirrors the evolution of our technological processes. Where teams once assembled pre-created packages into cohesive wholes—whether architectural elements, consumer packaged goods, or software libraries—we now orchestrate agents, prompts, and models in the same way.
The individual pieces aren't placed manually; they're directed through intention, vision, and taste This shift from construction to orchestration doesn't diminish creativity—it elevates it to a higher plane of abstraction.
But, we’ve been here before.
History tells us that every technological leap begins with excitement—and ends with a return to essence. Concrete gave us cities. Synthetic fabrics gave us mass fashion. The internet gave us access to all the knowledge we could possibly want (or need). Now, AI has given us scale, speed, and automation.
But as we gain capabilities, we also yearn for friction. From brutalism back to biophilic design. From fast fashion to upcycled heirlooms. The pendulum always swings back.
Today, everyone is a writer, designer, strategist, and developer—with the right prompt and the right AI assistant, that is. That’s progress. But it also reframes our earlier question to focus on our potential influence and impact in the modern world:
What role do humans play in an AI-powered world?
In 2003, Eric Evans published Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. His premise? Build software around real-world business needs. When I began working as a project manager in 2016, this was gospel. Requirements first, code second.
Fast-forward to 2025: we have AI copilots, prompt engineers, and "vibe coding" sessions. Yet the principle remains:Software is business logic made digital. Whether you’re coding in Turbo Pascal or building with Copilot and Cursor, tools evolve. But fundamentals remain.
Better tools don’t replace professionals. They raise the bar while also redefining what professionalism is.
Focusing solely on tools assumes efficiency is the only metric. But ironically, the more sophisticated the tool, the less it differentiates you. It’s no longer a skill to know how to read, use Microsoft Word, or code in React.
One Insiders article described this aptly in the context of eCommerce UX:
“Most eCommerce websites I see are designed like the emergency exits on a plane: the only goal is to make sure that people, even under a shock, will find their way out.”
You can build that exit with AI today. But you can’t build meaning, emotion, or resonance—at least not yet.
What we're witnessing is nothing less than an inversion of value hierarchies. When anyone can generate functionally competent code, designs, or copy, the sacred quality becomes the human intention behind these artifacts.
Walter Benjamin wrote of art's "aura"—that ineffable quality that comes from its unique existence in time and space. In our age of mechanical—and now algorithmic—reproduction, this aura doesn't disappear; it relocates to the realm of intention. The question shifts from "How was this made?" to "Why was this made?" and "Who envisioned this?"
The new scarcity isn't technical capability but meaningful provenance—the authentic reason for something's existence beyond mere utility or profit.
Tools Enhance. They Don’t Originate.
Adobe’s GenStudio is a compelling case. Because while it enables marketers to rapidly scale performance content, it requires original creative to successfully power the machine.
Put more simply and directly, without strong ideas, AI merely accelerates failure and creates mediocre results. And with most eCommerce sites drowning in a sea of sameness—and consumers struggling to be inspired by them—mediocrity simply isn’t an option.
The same risks (and rewards) apply to startups. You can now build a full-stack MVP in days. But unless your idea, positioning, and message are sharp, AI will just get you to irrelevance faster.
From Four Years to Two Weeks
In 2018, launching an idea like “Airbnb for pets” meant years of development, testing, and marketing before likely failure. Today, the same cycle takes two weeks.
AI writes your code, builds your landing page, and emails your beta testers.
It’s magic. But also a trap.
Speed is no longer the bottleneck. But without constraints, every idea competes on the same saturated playing field.
Fewer constraints = faster launches = higher failure rates.
Which brings us to the real point: the new constraint is you. When technology stops being the constraint, the new limiting factor is… human. Not in a limiting sense—rather, in a clarifying one.
The constraint now is:
- Your ideas
- Your taste
- Your perspective
- Your ability to translate culture into product
If you have nothing original to say, the AI can’t say it for you.
A remarkable example comes from October 2022, when Ukrainian jewelry brand Sova launched a bracelet. A simple design, with each design made from five grams of a particular steel. Steel is an ultra-strong and durable alloy that can be remelted many times without losing its properties. The bracelets are made from steel produced on the legendary rolling mill 3600.
This very steel was used in 1981 to build a launch shaft for a spacecraft, and in 2012, for the new sarcophagus at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. In 2022, the rolling shop where the 3600 mill operated became a steel fortress where defenders of Ukraine heroically held the line.
That story made the product sell out in days. It’s not just about making a steel bracelet (we are not in the steel age after all). It’s about the idea, the myth, and the lore behind the steel bracelet.
This is what AI cannot generate: origin stories that matter.
Ideas Are the Scarcity
AI will fix your grammar.
AI will refine your layout.
AI will run your A/B tests.
But it will not give you a reason for your product to exist.
Or even a reason for your brand to exist.
The differentiator is no longer technical competence.
It’s originality. Authenticity. Human relevance.
This is your new brief:
Don’t just build faster. Build with intention.
The Sova bracelet illuminates something profound about modern commerce: as implementation barriers fall, the unified vision of a singular tastemaker becomes disproportionately valuable.
In software development and brand building, we've witnessed the siloization of product development—data-driven decisions fragmenting the customer experience into optimized but disconnected touchpoints. The result is functional but soulless commerce that fails to resonate at a deeper level.
Yet AI now makes it trivial for smaller teams, even individuals, to orchestrate changes of remarkable scale and grandeur. What emerges is the possibility to envision how thousands of individual touchpoints converge into a coherent, meaningful whole. Like the Oranta mosaic's artisans working from a unified vision, brands require a clear intentionality that transcends their individual components.
The most compelling commerce experiences of the coming decade won't be those with the most sophisticated algorithms, but those with the most coherent human vision orchestrating these algorithms toward meaningful ends.
Final Thoughts
If the last decade was about digital scale, the next will be about human signal.
Constraints haven’t gone away. They’ve just changed shape.
The new constraint is not a lack of tools, platforms, or capital. It’s what you believe. What you want to build. What story you want to leave behind.
Oranta still shines above the altar of Saint Sophia.
What will your mosaic be?
Oleksii (Alex) Lunkov is a digital commerce consultant and Fractional Chief E-Commerce Officer. He’s led transformation initiatives for brands like Wimbledon and Berry Bros. & Rudd, translating cultural heritage into digital performance. Today, he works with luxury and fashion clients such as Zielinski & Rozen, helping them find clarity in the chaos of modern commerce.
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