About 20 years ago I sketched a text page in Notepad and threw it onto the Internet. It was some kind of magic: you could talk to the world for next to nothing, without going to an ad agency. It was the time of web designers, not UX/UI, research and testing. Work-life balance, agile and all sorts of funny job titles were invented much later. Back then it was just the wild west: two-letter domains, layouts for 800×600, the 1px transparent gif, the 3ds Max encyclopedia. Nothing was structured, but everything was new and exciting. I realized what I wanted to do for a living. It was a time of hunger for new technology, and of actual hunger from freelancing on the Eastern European market. I wanted to work at night. There was plenty of naive enthusiasm and ambition, but little experience. Then came experience, outsourcing, standards, processes. Everything kept changing, a portfolio went stale in a couple of years, and most commercial projects never saw the light of day. But there was still curiosity and a sense of being part of something, a constant urge to learn new things. Only one thing changed: that very enthusiasm about making the world a better place wore off. Nothing personal, just business. The quality of the work doesn’t suffer, but it becomes just work.
And now there’s AI. I was an early adopter and a skeptic at the same time (when it comes to creativity, not automation). I played with generation from the early versions of Midjourney (back when you had to work hard to get a cat’s outline to look believable), I tried voice generation and voiceovers (after someone on Fiverr voiced my video with a robot). At work I set up a chain of agents and got some automation going. But I never replaced myself (luckily, I suppose). What I did discover was something that reminded me of how it felt 20 years ago, a little spark (there’s still too much skepticism for a fire).
Yes, I’m talking about vibe coding, don’t laugh. The time to laugh was when a WordPress widget cost 80 hours of a developer’s work, or when a login screen took a year to build. I know about the risks, quality and responsibility too. And I also love making fun of slop. But this is about a second chance to feel innovation in IT. There’s no point in blindly hating gen AI; objectively, it’s already a great tool today. Right now I’m in the perfect spot on the Gartner curve to look at things soberly:
Of course, I can’t skip the anxiety about my own skin in a world of robots. Especially while the market is still at the top of the curve (the Peak of Inflated Expectations), plus Trump’s hundred victories, plus expensive money, etcetera. But that’s part of the challenge: proving that you + a robot are better than just a robot. And here we come full circle, because 20 years ago nobody cared about your processes and skills either. They just wanted a result, a nice working website that sells tires. Being able to both sell and build. Speaking of building. There are no excuses left, except laziness, for not being able to bring an idea to life. Huge investments are rarely needed at the start anymore. That has called a lot of bluffs on the market: if nobody needs the product, you can find out very quickly and easily.
They dominated a whole species just by calling its bluff about wanting more free time.
Rick, Rick & Morty
A lot will change, a lot already has. But there won’t be any Skynet, don’t listen to the alarmists. Just use it and be useful. Make yourself useful, as the Americans say.