Every summer, three million people walk into Santiago de Compostela and photograph the cathedral. They stand in the Praça do Obradoiro with their phones raised, capturing the same façade from the same angle that fourteen million people captured the year before. They post it. They tag it. They feel they've been somewhere.
Then they eat in a restaurant with a menu in four languages and a photo of paella on the door, which is already suspicious because paella is Valencian and this is Galicia, and they pay eighteen euros for something that a local would describe, if pressed, as "technically food."
Two streets away, there's a pulpería where the polvo is so good it would make you reconsider your life choices. The wine is four euros. The menu is on a chalkboard, in Galician, and it hasn't changed since 2011 because it doesn't need to.
The tourist will never find it. Not because it's hidden — it's right there, on a street they walked past twice — but because they're not looking for it. They're looking for the thing everyone told them to look for.
This is exactly what's happening with artificial intelligence.
I have been watching the AI tourists arrive for two years now. You know them. You might be one. No offence — I was one too, briefly, before the novelty wore off and the work began.
The AI tourist visits ChatGPT, asks it to write a poem about their dog, and posts the result on LinkedIn with the caption "the future is here." They attend a webinar called "AI for Leaders: What You Need to Know" where someone in a blazer explains that AI will disrupt everything, without specifying what "everything" means or what "disrupt" looks like when it arrives at your desk on a Wednesday morning.
They have opinions about AGI. They've read the headlines. They know that Sam Altman said something and that Elon Musk disagreed, which is roughly the shape of all technology news in 2025.
They've photographed the cathedral. They feel they've been somewhere.
Meanwhile, the locals are eating polvo.
The locals are the people who use these tools every day, quietly, without posting about it. The developer who's figured out that if you explain the codebase structure before asking for a fix, the machine becomes twice as useful. The translator who uses it as a first draft and then rewrites — not because the machine is bad, but because the machine is almost good, which is a very specific kind of useful. The teacher who generates twenty variations of a maths problem in ten seconds and spends the saved hour actually talking to students.
None of these people are on stage at a conference. None of them have a newsletter called "The Future of Everything." They're just working. They found the pulpería. They go back every day because the food is good and the price is right.
Carlos Blanco has a bit about tourists in Santiago — the way they clog the Rua do Franco taking photos of themselves in front of restaurants they won't enter, while the locals squeeze past them to get to the good places, the ones without photos on the door. The comedian's eye catches what the tour guide misses: the real city is the one that's trying to get past you while you stand there with your selfie stick.
AI has the same problem. The real use is trying to get past the hype, squeezing through the crowd of people who are very excited about something they haven't actually tried.
Here's what the tourists get wrong: they think the cathedral is Santiago.
It's not. Santiago is the old mulher selling grelos at the market. Santiago is the university students arguing about Castelao in a bar that smells like damp stone and espresso. Santiago is the rain — always the rain — and the specific way people walk in it, unhurried, as if they and the rain have an understanding.
The cathedral is magnificent. No one's denying that. But it's the postcard, not the place.
And ChatGPT is magnificent — truly, I mean it. The technology is extraordinary. But the chatbot is the postcard. The place is what you build with it when no one's watching. The workflow you've refined over months. The ugly script that saves you two hours every Friday. The way you've learned to phrase things so the machine understands what you actually need, not what you literally said.
That knowledge doesn't photograph well. It's not a LinkedIn post. It's a pulpería on a side street, and you have to live here to find it.
The tourists will move on. They always do. Next year it'll be quantum computing, or brain-computer interfaces, or whatever the next cathedral is. They'll photograph that too. They'll have opinions.
The locals will still be here, eating polvo, using the tools that work, ignoring the ones that don't.
Two streets away from all the noise, the chalkboard menu hasn't changed. The wine is still four euros. And the food is still better than anything you'll find in a restaurant with a photo on the door.
Enfin.
If you're in Santiago and you want the good polvo, don't ask a tourist. Ask someone who looks like they're in a hurry. They know where they're going.
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