Hello World Indeed — Thoughtzeug

A little history

I've been working in technology for over thirty years. That's not a boast but a long series of fortunate accidents.

Thirty years working, straight through, no gaps, doing what I love. Lucky as hell.

I wouldn't put "thought leader," "tech bro," or "entrepreneur" after my name. What I am is a journeyman software engineer who has had the good fortune to never be the smartest person in the room.

I've experienced: the birth of the web, the dot-com boom, Web 2.0, the social media gold rush. Each one arrived with breathless hype and snake oil salesmen. But after the inevitable collapse, there was always something valuable that was left behind.

Now, as I enter what I know to be the last phase of my career, it's happening again. This time it is "AI".

I started trying LLMs for coding in the summer of 2024 with ChatGPT. It wasn't very good. Six months later I tried Copilot and realized assisted coding was possible. I even built my own coding assistant. Now in 2026 we have Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursive, and Codex. The way I program both personally and professionally has completely changed.

Where I stand

This month, I've finished five personal projects I couldn't start for years.

A year ago, each of those projects would have taken weeks, if not months. They were blocked by time, by information friction, or by my own emotional inertia. That includes this very site. The blogging framework code needed to generate this site took about an hour. A specification driven negotiation between me and a machine.

It's not just me, as a software engineer. People that have no training or experience in software development are able to accomplish these exact same things. They don't even have to know what computer language and framework it's written in.

That's a huge change. I'm excited about it, but I'd be lying if I said there wasn't an undercurrent of shear terror when I consider its potential for evil.

Martin Luther translated the Bible into German and broke the priesthood's monopoly on knowledge. For centuries, if you wanted to understand scripture, you needed a priest. Now you just need to be literate. AI is doing the exact same thing to my profession and all other information gatekeeping professions. The barriers are evaporating. What used to require years of specialized training is becoming accessible to anyone willing to learn, and I don't think we've begun to reckon with what that means.

And I have to. We all have to.

Shout out to MERRITT K and their article Have a Fucking Website for the inspiration to follow through with this.