Artificial Intelligence: A Rocket Ship for the Mind

Programming has become increasingly fun.

That's not a sentence I expected to write a few years ago, but here we are. AI has fundamentally changed my relationship with code, and more surprisingly, it's put me on the same level as some of my bosses who've been coding for decades.

This realization is both exhilarating and terrifying.

The Cataclysmic Shift

Let's be clear: what's happening right now is cataclysmically shifting the way we work. The democratization of technical skills that once took years to develop is happening at breakneck speed. Is AGI on the way? I don't think so, not yet. But what we have today is already reshaping everything we thought we knew about work, creativity, and human potential.

Here's the thing though: I actually think the benefits far outweigh the potential downfalls.

From Bicycle to Rocket Ship

Steve Jobs famously said that a computer is a bicycle for the mind. If that's true, then AI is a rocket ship for the mind.

Starting my projects has become increasingly easy. AI has removed so much of the friction and roadblocks that used to slow down the creative process. Those tedious hours spent on boilerplate code, debugging syntax errors, or searching through documentation? Gone.

Think about the traditional creative process:

  1. Get an idea
  2. Try it out
  3. It sucks
  4. Go back and refine
  5. Repeat

What AI does is revolutionary: it allows you to go through more iterations of that cycle far more quickly. What remains is pure creation, but at an unprecedented pace. The bottleneck is no longer technical execution; it's imagination and taste.

Hallucinations as Creativity

But here's where it gets interesting. There's often talk about AI hallucinations as if they're a bug. But I often think to myself: isn't that what creativity is?

Think deeply about it. What is creativity but the mind's own hallucination that the person follows until they discover it's useless or not? Every creative breakthrough started as someone's wild idea: a mental hallucination that turned out to be valuable.

Given this, the rate at which we can "hallucinate" is now cheaper with artificial intelligence. Creativity itself has, in its own way, been automated. And what's even more powerful is that these hallucinations, this creative process from start to finish, has an increasing rate.

This leads to idea generation, taste variations, and creative exploration at a rate we have never seen before. We're not just thinking faster; we're dreaming faster, failing faster, and discovering faster.

The New Differentiator: Taste

Which brings us to what really matters now. The emphasis becomes: who can refine more precisely? More accurately? And most importantly, with better taste?

This is something AI hasn't been able to quite figure out yet. Sure, it can generate landing pages, write boilerplate code, and handle basic writing tasks. But taste? That ineffable quality that separates good from great? That's still uniquely human.

We're entering an era where the speed of iteration becomes a superpower. Those who can rapidly prototype, test, fail, and refine will thrive. The playing field isn't level; it's been completely reimagined.

The Race for Compute

Big tech companies have realized this shift too. The race may not be about the actual models anymore; it might just be about computing power. While in the past it used to be a race to get as much talent as possible, now we have companies literally building their own nuclear power plants. Why? Because they can 10x their output through this iteration process.

The shift is staggering. Microsoft, Google, Amazon: they're not just investing in better algorithms; they're investing in the raw computational power to iterate faster than anyone else. The company that can run the most experiments, test the most variations, and iterate the quickest wins.

Talent will still be important, of course. I have thoughts on how sacrificing talent may actually make companies lose out in the end, but that's for another blog post.

Looking Forward

What excites me most isn't the AI itself, but what it enables us to do. When the friction of execution disappears, what remains is pure creativity, vision, and the human ability to recognize what truly matters.

Programming has become fun again because I'm spending less time fighting with syntax and more time building things that matter. And if that's not a reason to be optimistic about the future, I don't know what is.

The rocket ship is here. The question is: where will you fly?