I've been kicking around the IT world long enough that, in an era like this one, I spend a fair amount of time bouncing between anxiety and relief.

OpenAI's ChatGPT and Codex, updating what feels like daily. Anthropic's Claude. I spend more of my day with these things than I'd probably like to admit. lol

Here's the cycle I keep running with them:

  1. Throw some vague idea at the AI.

  2. Get an answer back within a day.

  3. Wow. Dopamine explosion. Time to actually use it.

  4. Try to apply it and... something's off. Something's not quite right.

  5. Spend the next 30 days fixing that something.

And then the cycle just... starts over.

GIF
ai, ai,ai,ai,ai,ai

AI's been a genuinely massive help—I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Vibe coding, design, all of it. Stuff that used to be locked behind "you need a professional and dozens of hours" now mostly just appears, as long as you hand over the structure, the direction, and the goal. And when someone who couldn't write a clean line of code is suddenly shipping something in a few days, it's honestly a little terrifying and a little thrilling at the same time.

But the output? Always a little unsatisfying.

You get to 80%, 90%, ridiculously fast. The problem is that last 10%. The edge—the part that actually lands, the thing that makes a person feel something. Finding it and sanding it down is the hard part. And it's hard for a specific reason: that 10% is nearly impossible to put into words. You know something's wrong, but you can't point at what. It lives in the gut, not the prompt.

So you cling tighter, keep pushing the AI to nail that last stretch—and that's exactly when the hallucinations kick in and a perfectly fine result slides backward to -20%. You started at 90%, and somewhere along the way you're staring at 70%. Magic. Sad, sad magic.

GIF
do it plz

And yet. There's one thing that makes all of that collateral damage look forgivable, even charming: you can just say "do it."

Because think about what it used to take to get anything moving with a team. Meetings to communicate. Communication to prep for the meetings. Rapport-building to enable the communication. Buildup on buildup on buildup. And even after all that, the moment you'd float "hey, should we actually try this?"—you could watch the color drain out of everyone's face. (It's not just me, right?)

Now I skip all of it. If I want something, I say do it. And the AI—like it or not, right or wrong, whether it has any clue what it's doing—hands me an answer. No rapport required. No reading the room. It never once asks me "wait, why are we even doing this?"

How is that not incredible? The answer isn't perfect, sure. But it tickles the dopamine, doesn't it?

From the age of everyone-starts-a-company down to solo development... once the barrier drops this low, the software market is going to flood. And in a world where everybody can conjure something by just saying "do it," who actually wins? The person obsessing over that last 10%? Or the person cranking out 90%-good things faster and in greater volume than anyone else? That question is the most fascinating part right now—and also the thing that loops me right back to where I started, somewhere between anxiety and relief.

Anyway. I'll figure it out later. First, let me go say "do it" a few times.