“Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it.”
I’ve been working in an environment where heavy AI usage has been the default for a few months now, and I’ve noticed an interesting shift in the economics of recognition.
If exceptional work is increasingly assumed to be AI-generated, the incentive to produce exceptional work may gradually weaken. Recognition has always been part of what motivates people to push beyond “good enough”.
The challenge is that AI makes authorship harder to infer from the output. Even when you solve a problem where AI failed, others may still assume AI did most of the work. As recognition becomes less connected to visible skill, the incentives around excellence begin to change.