Twice a month in Orléans, a group gathers with sketchbooks for Urban Sketchers. The biggest challenge isn’t perspective or color mixing. It’s letting go.

New sketchers want to control everything. They reach for the eraser. They freeze, afraid to commit. The experienced sketcher? They embrace the “wrong” line. They work with accidents. They trust the process.

Developers have the same problem. We want to see every line. The idea of letting an AI write code for hours, unsupervised? Terrifying. Yet Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, shared his stats: 259 PRs, 40k lines added in 30 days - all written by Claude running autonomously.

The skill isn’t prompting. It’s letting go.

Letting go ≠ giving up

Letting go isn’t abandonment. It’s prepared trust.

Before I sketch, I choose my composition, decide what to emphasize, accept what I’ll ignore. Before YOLO mode, you write a clear plan, set up guardrails, define success criteria.

In both cases, the work happens before you let go. The lâcher-prise is earned.

Jazz improvisation. Pollock’s gesture painting. Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.” Every art form has this: you prepare, then you release. Coding never had this. Until now.

A new medium

Each technology - photography, cinema, digital art - required artists to develop new relationships with control. What’s emerging now isn’t “AI makes art.” It’s human + autonomous AI as collaborative medium.

The human role shifts from executor to composer of constraints. You design the system, set the boundaries, then… let go.