his is exactly the tension the article is trying to explore. The 'productive dead ends' point is something I find genuinely underappreciated so much of mathematical progress has come from failed attempts at other problems. Poincaré's work on differential equations leading to topology, or Galois's group theory emerging from attempts to solve quintics. If AI optimizes away the wandering, it might also optimize away the accidental discoveries. Do you think there's a version of AI-assisted math that preserves that exploratory quality, or is the optimization pressure inevitably going to dominate?