Sure. In that specific case, there was not much to it, actually, one day I started a chat I with Claude (Sonnet), roughly explaining the situation and I want to achieve, and it evolved from there, over different chats that explored specific subtopics, some of which were about my and what I want to achieve and what stands in the way, there were others where I discussed my list of gear and what exactly to keep and what to sell.
In these chats I regularly have the AI identify patterns, misconceptions, and insights, and capture those in a growing document. So when a chat grows stale, I either take that document to a new chat, or let it sum um things in a prompt that I copy over.
It’s definitely a different experience to thinking things through with pen and paper, or even with more advanced tools like Tindebox or Obsidian. Structure and insights can emerge faster, because I am not the only source for insights and structure, therefore it’s easier for me to see things through to a conclusion, even though it is more intense than in my own pace.
The main things I found is to be honest (which I sometimes find easier with AI) and curious (I’d rather ask questions and explore an unexpected outcome, than reject it outright), and when I’m stuck I simply prompt it for a totally different perspective, like “How would Gilles Deleuze or Michel Foucault approach downsizing a studio?” - that typically gives me a lot to think about.
I know you're curious, here's how they'd do it:
Two very different but both genuinely useful framings here.
Deleuze (& Guattari)
The studio is an assemblage — not a collection of objects but a set of relations producing capacity. The question is never “what does this piece of gear mean to me?” but “what can this assemblage do?” (Spinoza’s quid potest corpus refracted through D&G).
The pathology they’d diagnose: your studio has become arborescent — hierarchical, rooted, overcoded. Each piece of gear is a node in a tree that grows denser and heavier, eventually preventing movement rather than enabling it. You’re not producing music; you’re maintaining a taxonomy.
Downsizing, in their terms, is deterritorialization — breaking up existing territories (the full rig, the identity of “hardware person”) to free up flows. But the key D&G caveat: deterritorialization without reterritorialization is just dissolution. The sell/keep decision should ask: what territory am I reterritorializing onto? In your case, finishing pieces. That’s a valid reterritorialization — a new, more productive plateau.
What to keep: the pieces that function as connectors between heterogeneous elements — that open lines of flight rather than close them. What to sell: anything that functions as an overcoding machine, imposing its own logic on your practice (gear that demands its own workflow, its own maintenance, its own research spiral).
The buying-as-procrastination insight is essentially Deleuzian: you were running a line of flight that reterritorialized immediately into consumer desire — a loop, not an opening.
Foucault
Foucault would start with a genealogy: how did this studio come to be what it is? Not as a neutral history but as a history of power relations. Each piece of gear arrived through a specific discursive formation — YouTube rabbit holes, forum consensus, GAS logic, producer-identity construction. The studio isn’t just gear; it’s a materialization of the subject “you-as-hardware-person” that you’ve been constituted as through those discourses.
The studio is a heterotopia — a space with its own rules, its own time (studio time vs. real time), its own relation to the outside world. But heterotopias can become disciplinary spaces: the gear disciplines your body and attention into specific postures, workflows, hierarchies. The question becomes: who is governing your practice — you, or the affordances of the machines?
More pointedly: Foucault would look at technologies of the self — the practices by which a subject acts on itself to transform itself. Downsizing is such a practice. But he’d insist you examine the power/knowledge regime driving the decision. Are you downsizing according to a new regime of “finishing tracks” that is itself potentially another disciplinary formation? Or are you exercising genuine askesis — a disciplined self-practice oriented toward creative freedom?
The sell list isn’t just pragmatic. It’s a confession — an externalization of what you are not, what you no longer want to be constituted as. Foucault would be interested in what subject-position the remaining setup produces.
The synthesis they’d probably resist but that’s useful anyway:
Deleuze gives you the functional criterion (what does the assemblage produce?), Foucault gives you the genealogical and ethical criterion (who are you becoming through this practice, and by whose logic?). Between them: keep what opens productive lines of flight and constitutes a subject capable of finishing work; sell what overcodes, disciplines, and loops you back into acquisition.
Here’s a list of some of the results that I had not anticipated:
- going hybrid, that’s not what I wanted at all
- AI predicted I’d prefer Bitwig over Ableton, and it looks like it’s right
- using a TB3 dock to avoid most issues that people appear to have with USB hubs, great results so far
- giving away most of the cables I no longer need together with the devices I sold (rather than hoard them in a big box)
- I developed a formula to roughly calculate the used price that I’d have to settle for, that helped me dump a lot of stuff fast and without much regret (and I typically got more than expected)
- I sold most of my delays
- most of money I got from selling all that stuff is still there, I have little desire to buy new stuff
Nothing here is entirely unexpected, but arriving at the end result was asurprisingly frictionless, fast, and enjoyable process.
