Hello Friends,
Last year I announced that I was launching my next big project — Dane of Earth — in which I would be exploring ways to reinvent myself and offer some value to the world amidst our turbulent times.
I wrote a few blog posts, but before long I went silent again. Sorry about that! 
But just because I’ve been silent and invisible, doesn’t mean that I haven’t been active. Over the last year I have been on a massive learning curve and personal growth experience, and now I’m ready to start sharing what I’ve learned.
I’ve always been a keen observer of the society, culture, politics, business and economics, technology, science, and many other topics, but I have generally kept my thoughts and opinions to myself — at least online.
I’ve decided it’s time to change that. I think I have some significant perspectives to contribute to the public forum, so I’m going to sound off on those.
One of the most important topics that I am actively engaged in is Artificial Intelligence. So I’m going to dive right into the deep end by sharing an important perspective on this critical topic that I think is underrepresented in the current discussion.
Around the beginning of the year, I got into vibe coding with coding agents like Google’s Antigravity, OpenAI’s Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor. For those who don’t know, ‘vibe coding’ is where you simply describe to the coding agent what you want to build, and then just keep adding onto it and refining it as you go. What’s so awesome about it is I don’t have to write any code myself — I just have to tell the AI clearly what I want the app to do or look like.
I had tried getting into vibe coding about a year and a half ago, and then again last summer, but both times had found it way too frustrating to work with. But when I tried it again in February, everything clicked. Suddenly the code I was developing with AI agents wasn’t disintegrating before my eyes. It was cohering into really kickass applications!
I spent countless hours doing web development on the LAMP stack for about 15 years before burning out on it around 2015. I never wanted to be coder. I only learned to code because I had cool business plans I wanted to develop and I couldn’t afford to pay real coders. So I learned it the hard way — self-taught from websites like php.net and Stack Overflow. And over the years, I had built some pretty cool applications.
I always loved the development of the projects and imagineering how they could function in the real world and change peoples’ lives. But I hated the coding part. And I just wasn’t a good enough coder nor did I have enough time to fully develop my ideas into viable applications.
In other words, for all these decades now, my imagination has been writing checks that my skills and resources couldn’t cash.
And now, everything has changed. Now I can spend a few hours with these coding agents and produce features that would have taken me weeks or months to figure out. And ultimately, it is code that would never have been written.
I hope you can appreciate what this means to me. All my life, I’ve been coming up with billion dollar business ideas, but I could never execute on them. Now I can.
And I am.
I’ll be making announcements about the cool projects I’m working on in the days to come. But I thought I’d start by providing a perspective on the ‘Is AI awesome or horrible?’ discussion.
Whether or not AI will cause massive unemployment is still very much up for debate. I have many thoughts on this subject and will dive into that soon. But for now, I just want to make sure people don’t forget to consider the wildcard factor in all this — people like me.
Because I know I’m not the only one.
How many other people are there like me out there, whose potential is trapped inside their own minds because they didn’t have the tools to manifest them into reality?
Is it better to have one inspired person with breakthrough ideas empowered to change the world? Or to employ five people earning a steady paycheck from working at unrewarding jobs?
Something to think about.
Let me know what you think! Do you love AI? Hate it? Or do you you have a finer point to put on the question, too?