“It’s 3am on a Saturday. The pale white light contrasts starkly against the pitch-black room. In the corner, a man hunched over his laptop screen eyes unblinking. He is witnessing history.”
Lost in the everyday thrum of reality, the AI topic means many things to many people. Most have heard of it. Some are optimistic, and some pessimistic. Everyone agrees it will have an impact, though no one can quite agree on what it will be. And a vanishingly tiny few are spending their days near rapturous about it. Living in the 7x7 and holding this belief are near concentric circles.
Naturally it fell upon me living in Miami to vibe into this belief structure. While I don’t think we’re literally about to invent machine god, I am increasingly realizing that the world has changed once again, in the same way it changed in 2007 when the iPhone first launched. Mobile was the culmination of advances in personal computing technology, chip & component development, and telecom networks. AI increasingly feels like it’s a culmination of advances in datacenters, cloud, and machine learning.
In 2003 the following companies did not exist – Uber, Airbnb, Tinder, DoorDash, Venmo, Waze. The invention of a personal computer that contained a GPS chip and served a utility function so essential it forced us to carry it around all day is the reason these companies exist. Mobile changed how we navigate our cities, how we pay for things, hell how we meet the people we marry. The real-world impact of Mobile in such short a time is staggering to behold. AI is going to be bigger. Possibly an order of magnitude bigger. Put it this way – Mobile disrupted distribution. AI disrupts production itself.
As I write this, I have 3 separate terminal windows open. Claude Code is updating documentations on one of my apps, building out frontend features on another, and doing some deep web research ahead of sketching out the architecture for a third. Three months ago, git, pip, ide, tmux, and terraform were mysterious magic words, now they are my entire life. I cannot overstate this – I am not a software engineer, yet I have now built out V1s and prototypes of at least 20 apps in the last 2 months.
The implications of this are staggering. Put another way, pre-AI the cost per line of code was directly proportional to skyrocketing engineering salaries driven by Silicon Valley. Today and forever hence, the cost per line of code is approaching zero. The Internet made the creation & distribution of the written word abundant & plentiful and the one of the results was the implosion of the Media sector (newspaper, magazines, and the like). What do we think happens when AI makes the creation of code trivial and cheap? There’s a reason major SaaS companies are down 30-50%.
In my last post I was optimistic about us making it through because of our shared humanity. I still believe that to be true, in the medium-long run. But without sugarcoating it, I am worried about the short term.
The Industrial Revolution is widely understood to be the greatest boon for humanity since the invention of fire & agriculture. Lost in that is the staggering amount of job displacements and short-term pain that resulted. It contributed to the collapse of monarchic and feudal regimes, and arguably provided tinder for the sparks that led to two World Wars. But even that was spread over a period of 50-100 years. With AI we won’t have that luxury, it’s all going to happen in the next 10 years.
Being a witness to history is a weird feeling. This isn’t a motivational “we can all pull together and do it guys” type post. This is a warning. The tsunami is coming. You need to find higher ground. If you’re finding yourself denying the reality of what is occurring, you’re the equivalent of the fisherman going out on his tiny boat as a storm approaches. The water is already receding from the shore. Don’t stand there watching it. Move.