And just like that, the ideas are flowing again.

Fridays are demo days at Skyway, and it’s never been easier to throw together a quick proof of concept. Five years ago I had to work my ass off to build even highly simplistic things like HasIAMFailedOpenYet.com—that monstrosity took a few afternoons and still isn’t exactly great. Now I can create highly interactive interfaces through the sheer magic of bullying robots—and horrify my colleagues with the nonsense I’ve created.

My wife had an excellent observation last night about the state of AI when I showed her my latest shitposting absurdity: “what if there aren’t multiple trillions of dollars of value in AI, and it’s real value instead lies in empowering creatives?” It’s a fascinating question, and an unintuitive one given the significant pushback many creatives have had towards AI. I see myself as something of an “AI centrist” in that there’s clearly value, but not universe-shattering value. To that end, it’s an assistant rather than a replacement, and the breadth of that assistance is increasing rapidly. It unlocks value on my end to be able to apply the creative idea, and let the robot do the tedious copy and paste from StackOverflow part. As I write this I’ve got Claude Code in an isolated EC2 instance working on an entire app, just to see how far it gets.

The times, they are a’changing.