This weekend, I worked with a new partner, Claude Code. For the first time, from concept through the delivery of a final proof of concept, I had AI as a tool and colleague. Now it is time to investigate influences and how this partnership changed my processes.
This groundbreaking new approach triggered an ancient connection—as I am constantly linking the old and the new. My weekly AI-design routine led me to the concept of mētis.
I read the Odyssey again this year. Then I watched the 1968 Italian-British show with Bekim Fehmiu and a couple of film adaptations whose merits I won’t litigate. Later, I joined a reading club to expand my understanding of each chapter. This deep dive reminded me of a lot of what we tend to overlook when we are just attached to the newly launched.
Usually translated as cunning, a flat (and simplistic) term, mētis is a kind of intelligence that belongs to situations. It is an improvisational, situated intelligence, attuned to the specific. Odysseus, its avatar in Homer’s story, bears the title because he can recognize what the moment requires.
The protagonist of the Odyssey is the polymētis — the many-minded one.
Mastery and delegation are the dominant frames for using mētis, but neither captures the weaver’s knowledge of when to hold tight and when to let the thread slip. Mastery promises that with enough engineering and context, the tool becomes an extension of our will. Delegation promises you can hand off a defined task and expect a specific result. The latter makes us somewhat uncomfortable because the output it generates may not entirely be ours. A discomfort that I’ve been reworking once I managed to resignify it.
Reflecting on the work done, I feel the output generated with Claude wouldn’t exist without me—which makes it genuinely mine, at least as a creative partner.
This new work process feels like sailing. We set a direction, but the wind has its own ideas, and we proceed by adjusting. The tool occasionally surprises you—sometimes by misunderstanding in revealing ways, sometimes by finding a path you had not considered. The work, or the journey, is neither yours alone nor theirs; it emerges in between us, and its quality depends on how attentive we are to what is happening.
This is definitely mētis territory. It asks us to exercise our intelligence to work with a medium that pushes back.
Odysseus does not defeat most of his enemies through strength. He does not navigate by knowing the sea, since no one had charted it, but by reading it as it appears. Mētis is the discipline of working with what is actually in front of you, rather than what you wish were there.
It does not promise efficiency, though. The hero took ten years to get home, and the home he returned to was not the one he left. But he did arrive.
As a creator, I am not interested in productivity when it comes to AI. Productivity assumes the work is a known quantity, waiting to be executed faster. But the greatest creative work hides in these situations where you do not yet know what you are making, and the tool is part of how you find out.
Here’s to this form of observational intelligence that ensures we reach our destination by paying attention throughout. An ancient knowledge mastered by the Greeks and accessible through storytelling and literature.
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