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There's something comforting in not knowing.
In looking at a discipline, a tool, or a custom with clean eyes, without the weight of what it's supposed to be or should be. Ignorance, so maligned, is often a starting point for creating something interesting.
I think about the first times I've faced something completely new: a city, a language, a recipe, a digital product. At first there are no rules, no shortcuts, no warnings. Just curiosity and clumsiness, that inseparable duo. And it's precisely there, when experience hasn't tamed you, where the possibility of doing things differently appears.
The naïf attitude—that mix of naivety and boldness—is what allows you to skip the beaten paths. It's what makes you ask out loud what everyone takes for granted. It's what leads you to try absurd combinations, to ignore the "this is how it's always been done," to find beauty where others only see error.
Some time ago, my colleague Iria and I, after trying many pre-established recipes, decided to play dumb. To experiment and adopt an innocent attitude toward prompt engineering. The AI world is full of gurus who promise the foolproof recipe for writing the perfect prompt, as if such a thing existed. But reality is much more chaotic and, for that very reason, more interesting. Everything evolves so fast that any dogma ages before you finish reading it.
Instead of following instructions, we decided to experiment. We wrote prompts that consisted of small user stories with a narrative touch. We described how a person's work hours unfolded, their routines, their frustrations, relationships with colleagues, and at the end, we asked for an application that would make their daily life easier. Just like that, nothing more. And the results were surprisingly good. We left room for Lovable—the vibe coding tool we were playing with—to propose functionalities we hadn't even imagined. If we had followed the manual, we probably would have ended up asking for the same old thing.
I suppose AI has an advantage in this: it can have all the knowledge in the world, but lives in a kind of permanent emotional ignorance. It doesn't worry about having "hallucinations" or proposing unconventional solutions. It doesn't carry prejudices or fear of ridicule.
Ignorance is not a virtue in itself, but it is fertile ground. The problem isn't not knowing, but stopping wanting to learn. The problem is when knowledge becomes prejudice, dogma, routine.
That's why, sometimes, it's worth forgetting. Or at least pretending we don't know. Looking with fresh eyes. Asking stupid questions. Daring to mix what shouldn't be mixed. Because only from there, from that small abyss of not knowing, is it possible to invent something different.
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Written with the help of an AI assistant for documentation and trained on my previous texts.
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