We’ve been here before.
Not with AI, exactly — but with revolutions that change everything about how we work.
The Industrial Revolution changed the means of production.
Machines took over the heavy lifting. Speed replaced slowness. Scale replaced scarcity.
The Information Revolution changed the speed and reach of production.
Computers and the internet made ideas and transactions instantaneous. The world went from local to global in a single click.
Now, the AI Revolution is changing the nature of production.
It’s not our hands being replaced by machines — it’s our minds.
Knowledge, creativity, and decision-making can now be generated in seconds, without us ever touching the steps in between.
That’s convenient. But it’s also how we lose the dots.
In the late 1800s, another revolution was unfolding.
Industry was booming. Processes were being broken into smaller and smaller pieces.
And in the middle of it, a group of painters did something radical.
The Pointillists — Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and others — painted with thousands of tiny dots of pure color.
Camille Pissarro - Boulevard des Italiens, Morning, Sunlight - 1897
Up close, it looked almost mechanical. But step back, and those dots formed scenes of breathtaking life and movement.
Pointillism was more than a style. It was proof that even in a world obsessed with breaking things apart, the human eye, hand, and mind could still bring it all together into something greater than the sum of its parts.
That’s the lesson we need now.
AI can give you a “finished” result instantly, but without the dots — the context, the connections, the why behind the work — the picture doesn’t hold.
Thinking in Dots is our answer to that.
Each week, we’ll take one masterpiece of Pointillism (and later, Impressionism) and use it to teach a skill in AI thinking: agentic workflows, context engineering, vector strategy, and systems design.
You’ll get:
The Art: a work from a master, decoded for its lessons in craft and connection.
The Skill: one concept in AI or systems thinking you can add to your toolkit immediately.
The Connection: how it fits into the bigger picture you’re building — even if you can’t see it yet.
One dot at a time.
One week at a time.
Until you can step back and see the whole picture — and know you built it yourself.
Because beauty isn’t just in the final product.
It’s in knowing how the picture came to be.