Frank Chimero · Selling Lemons
October 3, 2025
At this point, it should be obvious how the market for lemons applies to ill-considered AI-generated content. I’ll let you sketch out that argument yourself since it’s fairly straightforward, and this thing is already long enough.Instead, let’s zag and revisit my point earlier about system-gaming becoming the most viable playbook instead of focusing on the product. As a consumer and as a designer, I hope this is a temporary state before a massive recalibration. The primacy of meta-activities—optimizing for algorithms, visibility theater, consumer entrapment, externalization of costs, performative internal alignment, horse-trading amongst a set of DOA ideas—is poison. It is a road to nowhere worth going.
Source: Frank Chimero · Selling Lemons
In an online world where everything promises to be measurable, then it’s only logical that what we measure is what we ultimately optimise for.
Frank Chimero here observes these are the outcomes rather than the outputs of the process of developing products.
In this case, our products are merely a tool to achieve those outcomes, not the end in itself.
It may not make us immensely wealthy, but focusing on great outputs, great products, great design, great engineering is something to aspire to.
