I Shop, Therefore I Am (Still?)
Automation Took Our Tasks. Now It’s Coming for Our Taste.
I’ve been thinking about what happens when we stop choosing and when AI agents will soon shop, compare, and decide for us. They’ll restock our groceries, pick our clothes, maybe even negotiate our deals.
On paper, it sounds efficient and even comforting. But I keep coming back to what choosing actually means.
Choice has always shaped how I define myself. Years of curating tools, designs, and words have taught me that taste is related with my identity and every decision I make carries my fingerprint.
So what happens to that fingerprint when my agent starts deciding for me? It might know my patterns, but does it understand what makes a decision mine?
Delegating Desire
What fascinates me about agentic systems is their certainty. They don’t hesitate and just decide.
But that decisiveness has a cost. When we delegate choice, we also delegate desire. Every automated action trains a version of us that’s slightly more predictable and perhaps a little cleaner, a little less curious.
We teach the machine what we like, it feeds the pattern back, and the edges of our curiosity wear down. Convenience becomes repetition.
And that’s what I keep turning over in my head. When everything is optimised to please us, what happens to the parts of us that want to be surprised?
The Art of Intentional Delegation
The answer? To stay awake while we use AI. Automation works best when it expands our attention.
Here’s how I try to stay intentional:
1. Keep one decision manual. Automate the mundane, but guard a few choices as your own. Pick your book. Choose your route. Make the call. Those small decisions build judgment.
2. Teach your AI. Feedback is the new authorship. Every time you correct an AI, you remind it who you are.
3. Revisit your limits. Agents evolve, and so should your boundaries. Ask, which choices still teach me something?
4. Seek friction on purpose. Curiosity lives outside the algorithm. Ask your AI to show you something it thinks you won’t like. Surprise yourself.
We built these systems to buy us time. Now we have to decide what that time is for.
Build Your Own Reflection
If you’ve never built an AI agent, try it once. On platforms like LaunchLemonade, you can design an agent that remembers your tone, values, and decision style… your own digital reflection.
You’ll learn quickly how much personality hides inside every parameter that includes what it remembers and what it ignores. You can also see what it gets wrong.
And when you catch yourself saying, “That’s not me,” that’s the edge of your authorship.
The Simple Question
Every time you let AI choose for you, you make a trade. You gain time, but what do you lose in return?
So ask yourself, “what’s one decision I never want to delegate?”
The future won’t erase choice but it’ll tempt us to outsource it.
So the challenge is to know which decisions define you and to hold onto them.
All the Zest 🍋
Cien