A lot of the talk is about AI enabling creativity and a new wave of creators, while its opposition calls it slop and a useless waste of water — or some other bullshit that losers tell the ones who build. But I want to talk about how AI is fundamentally changing human communication. The part of it where we think about the boundaries of norms and values.

Will most of the products made with AI become billion-dollar companies? Obviously not. Just like not all painters end up in the Louvre. But it will unleash creativity in a lot of people who were held back by the tools. Will it be world-class creativity? Obviously not. But will it make people more content? Like any creative process — obviously yes.

And there are a lot of masters of the craft who have defended, and will keep defending, their craft with sharp words. I was thinking recently that I spend something like tens of hours a week coding outside of my work projects. I hadn’t done that since my late youth. And what happened in my late youth? I went to work at tech companies and started working with more senior people whose main interest wasn’t building anything — it was their own, mostly stupid, social games. I was clever enough to figure that if it’s all a social dance, why even bother building anything — so go into management and skip all the stupid shenanigans down in the dirty tech pit for nothing. For a long time I lost all interest in building anything by hand. But I never felt any real contentment from management. It was a job, and I did it pretty well. The only contentment I felt came from seeing what I could build with the teams I had.

Now I see a lot of senior people getting back to building like they used to — CEOs, CTOs, PMs, people well established in their roles, finding the urge to do something with their hands again, and many of them do it beautifully.

And I see a lot of professional coders arguing about slop, and look — I think these are the very people who made me leave building behind: the sleazy mud-pit creatures who argue about every possible thing except actually building something, thinking they’re the best engineers in the world while deep down they know Opus is better. So they use it in the closet while screaming about vibe coding — or they don’t use it at all, because they haven’t built anything that works in years.

So when I was starting my career 20 years ago, I had to talk to people to learn, get through all the hazing, take the humiliation to reach the knowledge — half of which was wrong or outdated anyway. Now I have a partner. It listens. It knows far more than I do, it lacks some of my expertise, but it treats me as a peer — not as an adversary or someone to bully.

Humans still gatekeep resources and industries, so yes, your much better vibe-coded app won’t surpass the Silicon Valley poster children, and you still have to deal with sleazy people to build a career or a business. But at least now a lot of people know it can be different — that this isn’t the norm. And that’s a very empowering thing to know.