From Hoarding to Curating: Thriving in the Age of Infinite Creation

A deep shift is required in how we engage with knowledge. Moving from treating knowledge as a limited resource to seeing it as a dynamic, ever-flowing stream fundamentally changes how we perceive and interact with information. Rather than hoarding knowledge as a fixed asset, we can now view it as a renewable flow, accessible and regenerative as needed.

In the past, every artifact—an image, code snippet, post—was a crystallized unit of effort, because:

• ✅ Cost: It cost time, money, and mental energy to create.
• ✅ Static Tools: The tools were static—Photoshop, IDEs, Word. Once created, an artifact wasn’t easily revised or regenerated.
• ✅ Knowledge Scarcity: Knowledge scarcity forced hoarding: “I might need this later because I can’t easily reproduce it.”

But with LLMs (and generative tools in general), the economics of creation flip:

• 💡 Cheap Creation: Creation becomes cheap and iterative—you can spin up 10 drafts, compare, refine.
• 💡 Storage Shift: Storage is no longer the bottleneck—contextual generation is.
• 💡 Curation: What matters is knowing what to keep, what to let go, and how to recreate on demand.

This means curation > collection.

A few mental models for this shift:

• “Garden not warehouse”: You don’t need to stockpile seeds (artifacts); you cultivate themes and let things grow seasonally.
• “Knowledge liquidity”: Instead of freezing knowledge into static artifacts, keep it liquid in your workflows (prompts, systems, styles).
• “Priceless is worthless”: If everything can be regenerated at near-zero cost, the value shifts to taste (your ability to select and refine).

Practically, this looks like:

• 🗑 Aggressive pruning: Delete mediocre drafts. Only keep artifacts that are unique synthesis or emotionally significant.
• 🗂 Meta-curation: Instead of saving outputs, save prompt patterns, workflows, and principles that got you there.
• 🔁 Fluid recreation: Trust you can recreate 95% of past outputs if needed—faster and better.
• 🧠 Taste-building loop: Focus your energy on improving your sense of quality rather than stockpiling “stuff.”

You’re moving from scarcity-era digital infrastructure (folders, archives, Evernote hoards) to a flow-based creative infrastructure (LLM prompts, style guides, reusable patterns).

🔥 Key question to ask yourself going forward: "If I didn’t save this, how easily could I recreate or improve it? And would I even want to?"