I am not an old one, my career began in 2017, but my childhood was moulded by advancements in computing and digital experiences. I was 10 when I opened the lid of a bulky Toshiba laptop, which felt like rubbing the lamp and seeing windows-98 appear in place of a genie, which to be honest granted all my childhood self's wishes. Soon I saw a Playstation-2, soon after, an iPod, a few years later my family could afford a PC so we got one. I saw PC games, I saw a C compiler, I built some terminal based games(Artemis Fowl style catacomb adventure). And when I went to college in 2013, I was given my first laptop, an Asus machine with Nvidia GT-520MX. I played assassins creed, a lot.

Finding out what was happening

I recently got obsessed with knowing my work's "roots". I am not from Silicon Valley, let alone a US citizen, but software has always felt pretty welcoming and open. So I wanted to find out more about the valley, more about the history, more about what was happening when I was clicking "Add Friend" on Facebook.

I started listening to On the Metal, and my god, the interviews are riveting. I am halfway through The Root of the Root of all Evil by Casey Muratori and halfway through Burn Book by Kara Swisher, and I am loving this half-and-half. I am also reading We are the Nerds by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin.

All this reading and watching made me nostalgic for a past I never actively participated in but it still feels like my past. And that's because what came from this past made me who I am, made many of my generation who they are.

As I see it, what happened was a renaissance, ushering the age of digital, giving people new and exciting ways to experience reality itself. What do you mean I can play Halo on a box with my friends who are not in this room with me? What do you mean I can listen to Linkin Park while I run? What do you mean I can order a book from overseas? What do you mean by Daft Bodies?

Why doesn't AI feel the same?

As I said, tech was exciting because it expanded what one can experience, and where precisely on our senses do those experiences land. Whereas AI seems to produce "art" that no one wants, songs that no one wants and words that no one wants to bother reading.

There's just nothing exciting!

So, this is about work. Earlier tech boom did both. It enabled work and it enabled fun. It enabled word-processors and PDFs, which enabled magazines that people could read. It enabled TCP, which enabled communication that people used to rick-roll other people.

But we did have rabbit and humane which flopped because of poor hardware. We have so so many copilots. And we have friend.com.

So, apparently, that's our version of fun using AI, devices that attempt to replace existing better devices and services that aim to replace human contact.

Why I am still hopeful?

Me, personally, as an engineer, well I am hopeful. Let me show you why:

I was contemplating getting the new Mac-studio to do local models stuff, and I thought let's check if my steam library is compatible with the idea of using the Mac-studio as a tiny gaming box as well.

I couldn't find an easy way to feed the library to claude, so I simply opened the source, copied appropriate html block which contained many many divs but underneath there was information of my entire library, in a structured form.

So I gave this html to claude and voila I got back a CSV. Which I then fed to claude again, and got this, a view of my library with a score and confidence on how well the game would work on my chosen Mac-studio.

Nothing special here, nothing new here, since chat-gpt's debut, people have been doing similar things.

But it represents something special to me.

I feel like I have been granted a magic chalk, which I can use to draw specific solutions for my specific problems.

Now imagine if everyone had this chalk.

Is it exciting?

There are big problems and there are small problems. Going to space is a big problem, sending books to my reMarkable wirelessly is a small problem. But it is MY small problem. The world is filled with people that have their own small problems. Put them together as total human-frustration-experienced, and suddenly it's a BIG problem.

And that's where AI comes in, it's the connective tissue, it's the adaptive fluid that shapes itself perfectly in the gaps of our small problems, fills those gaps, and enables us to do "better work which is less grunt-y".

Imagine local models you employ to run on your hardware to fix your specific gap in your specific workflow. Imagine the future promised by IFTTT fully realised.

I think that's exciting.

Why is this not what we are being sold?

Well, if you start fixing your problems, then who will pay me? who will pay Microsoft for their notepad that had an RCE?

And because of AI's ability to hand the means of production to the masses, we see centralisation by players who will lose the most. We see claude killing design, and we see AI killing artists, well they are trying and failing.

What next?

AI is a task-doer, and we as a civilisation are yet to pick good tasks. The excitement that the last tech boom had isn't being delivered by this AI boom, not because AI is an inferior development, but rather there's no iPhone equivalent vision for AI.

So until then, let's just build things for ourselves, solve OUR problems, make OUR lives easier.

For that to happen, software development truly needs to be democratised, and we are so close. There are still barriers but AI has raised the floor itself, and brought us closer to smashing them down.

To me success looks like my mom building a solution for herself, a teacher in school customising their lesson based on how they want to teach something to their class, in their specific ways, because that's what consumer-AI looks like.

This is not an announcement of me building another startup, far from it, I mean I am still reeling from my last one. But it is a call, to the community I call my own, to solve OUR problems and help others around us to solve THEIRS.

PS: All our advancements came from SciFi, from video calls, to tablets, we have had a decent picture of what we wanted the future to look like, and how we want to connect with each other. And if I treat the entirety of what SciFi has imagined as a roadmap, I guess the tech boom covered ~30% of it. There's so so much of fun stuff that's still on the roadmap!