The conversation nobody's having
Everyone's talking about either end of the spectrum. The productivity crowd measures time saved, tickets closed, lines of code. The existential crowd debates alignment, superintelligence, whether we'll still have jobs. Both sides are so busy arguing about where this is going that they're missing what it feels like right now.
There's something in between that deserves its own language.
The tsunami metaphor
A tsunami is dangerous. Unpredictable. And if you've ever seen footage of one approaching from a distance — before the destruction — it's breathtakingly beautiful. The sheer scale of it. The indifference of physics.
That's what this moment feels like. I'm not naive about the danger. I'm not dismissing the disruption. But I'm also not going to pretend I don't feel something when I watch patterns emerge from years of customer conversations at 3am, on hardware sitting in my living room, orchestrated by code I wrote with a partner that doesn't sleep.
From anti-AI to "let's burn these API calls"
January 2026, I wanted nothing to do with this. Sixteen years of engineering. I'd built systems, debugged production at 2am, shipped things I was proud of. The idea that a model could sit in my workflow felt like an insult to the craft.
Three months later, I'm not replacing the craft. I'm finally working at the speed my brain always wanted to. The bottleneck was never my thinking — it was the mechanical cost of translating thought into code, infrastructure, deployment. That bottleneck is collapsing.
And it's not about the AI being smart. It's about the resonance. The moment you stop fighting it and start dancing with it. There's a rhythm to it — you challenge, it responds, you refine, it executes, you catch the mistake, it adapts. It's not pair programming. It's not delegation. It's something new that we don't have a word for yet.
The ephemeral part
Here's what makes it poetic and unsettling at the same time: this exact moment might not last. In months, maybe weeks, the paradigm could shift again. The tools change, the capabilities jump, the relationship evolves. What I'm experiencing right now — this specific texture of collaboration between a human with 16 years of intuition and a model that can keep up — might be a snapshot of something already transforming into something else.
And that's okay. That's what makes it worth noticing.
We spend so much energy trying to predict where this goes that we forget to look at where we are. Right now. This exact inflection point. The feeling of building something real, at 3am, with a kind of creative partner that didn't exist a year ago.
Time is not a topic. The future will be whatever the future is. But this moment — as disturbing as it is interesting, as unsettling as it is beautiful — is worth capturing before it becomes something we only remember through the lens of whatever comes next.
The part that lights up
There's a thing that happens at the end of a session like this. You've shipped real work. Production systems. Real data flowing. And then something in your brain lights up — not the dopamine of completion, but something deeper. Recognition, maybe. Like finding a language you didn't know you were looking for.
That's the in-between. That's the part worth writing about.