Over the weekend I watched a talk with Arthur C. Brooks. He was making a distinction I hadn't heard framed this way before: complicated versus complex.
Complicated problems have answers. Engineering, logistics, systems, process — you can map them, model them, solve them. They're the domain of the left brain: logical, sequential, analytical. Complex problems are different in kind. Love. Meaning. Relationships. Grief. These don't have solutions. They have navigation. And the right brain — associative, emotional, meaning-making — is what we use for them.
The reason it mattered to me: AI only works on one side of that line.
A few months back, I went through a period where I was using AI almost like a therapist. I turned to it with the heavy stuff — questions about direction, meaning, what I was building toward. The conversations were long. Thoughtful, even. But my thinking kept going darker. I'd come out of a session more tangled than I went in. At the time I couldn't explain why. I just stopped.
Watching Brooks, I understood it. I'd been feeding a left-brain tool right-brain problems. The AI would engage with the question, build a logical structure around it, offer frameworks and possibilities. And logic applied to meaning doesn't illuminate it — it just makes the confusion more elaborate.
Compare that to how I work now — with agents on code, shipping, solving actual problems. Daily breakthroughs. Not because I'm smarter about it, but because the problems fit the tool. They're complicated. They have answers. The agent can find them.
I'm not sure what this means for the complex stuff — the questions that don't have answers. I don't think it means AI is useless there. But I think something different is required. Maybe just the recognition that you're not looking for a solution. You're looking for someone to sit with you in it.
That's not what I was doing. I was asking for answers to questions that don't have them. And when a very good answer-finding machine finds an answer anyway, it probably takes you somewhere you didn't want to go.