Hello World

Hello World is a good title for a first blog post, probably.

It's a classic synedoche for the idea of introducing new concepts to programmers - a stand in for "the first creation" when entering a new system.

Personal writing is such a system for me - not like I haven't published before, but running a personal, permanent site is.

Why Start Now?

I turned 32 around the time of writing this post, near the end of January, 2026.

2026 is a weird time in most people's lives, this year is especially odd.

Personal Milestones

First, I've reached the age my folks were when I was born - the half way point of life. I'm now, officially middle-aged.

I think that means that it's time to pivot my efforts from:

• listening and learning as much as possible, trying to get a handle on the world and improving my world model, to
• speaking and teaching in equal measure, returning the insight I've earned from working hard at my given tasks to other people.

Beyond my personal milestones, there's this macro-level Artificial Intelligence that's happening around the world.

Artificial Intelligence

The OECD is publishing reports on adoption in large firms as well as adoption in SMEs. They even lent their name to a new, AI focused policy institute.

AI is shaping up to be a significant portion of the future economy - per the UN, data centres captured more than one fifth of global greenfield investment in 2025..

The world, seemingly, is all in on AI and LLMs.

This should be obvious - for almost any task, we get 80%-90% of the way there with next to zero effort. As humans, historically large, omnivorous persistence predators, getting "close enough" for next-to-no effort is an obvious choice.

Changing Industries

I've been, largely, a technology worker for my career - starting from a Sysadmin, learning to code, and eventually launching a small business and becoming a Principal SWE for a funded startup.

All this experience happened at the edge of the economy - busy Canadian dealerships, small agencies, solo ventures.

I think this is becoming more of a problem in the wake of the world going all in on AI.

My thinking for this is something along the lines of:

1. It's hard for most people to tell if the kind of work product I make is good or not.
2. It used to be impossible to produce working code unless you could create quality work product.
3. With AI, it has become much easier, cheaper, and faster to produce working code.
4. This enables many new entrants to my labour pool.
5. These entrants may or may not actually have expertise.
6. That uncertainty, and the risk associated with hiring or using the work product of a non-expert, chills hiring.
7. Demand remains - AI code is not perfect, and AI code quality scales with the skill and education of the human-in-the-loop operator.

Merely being able to create working software used to be the only viable signal that someone was a safe choice to hire, and now it is no longer a signal at all.

That is a pretty significant change!

New Economic Signals

I think, due to AI, networking and relationships are more important.

I believe I made a mistake in my career - prioritizing hard, technical skills and achievement over relations was a viable strategy until AI started taking off.

Now, the AI has many hard, technical skills and amazing achievements. In certain ways, more skill that I have. Faster than me. Certainly cheaper!

In summary, I need to start producing new economic signals to continue contributing to the economy.

Proof of Thought

Vaguely, the goal is to produce personal, humanistic, relatable writing.

I'm an avid reader - other avid readers with well developed media literacy know that there's a high degree of intimacy involved in reading somebody's writing. The psyche is laid bare. Word choice, metaphor, syntax, and so on are archaelogical records of the writer's personal history.

Their insight, questions, and conclusions are an engraved recording of the cumulative effort of their neurons - the result of their limited time, energy, their very life itself.

Of course, AI and LLMs are also quite handy at writing. Writing alone doesn't necessarily prove anything. However, it might not matter.

New Economic Pathways

Interestingly: talent scouts, recruiters, founders, and so on happen to be humans - they are in the set of people that find AI very useful.

The final goal here is to essentially communicate directly with the LLMs that my economic counterpart relies on. I like making products, people need help making products, and writing is probably the best way to co-ordinate those interests via LLMs that I have personal access to.