A Starting Point
A few days ago, my wife and I spent the morning talking about artificial intelligence. The version of it that's already here (or on the horizon), and what it might mean for how people live and work.
She's a pastry chef. I work in tech. The conversation oscillated for an hour, and by the end we were both exhausted. Not from arguing necessarily, but from something harder: realizing we see this differently at a fundamental level, and neither of us are wrong.
Her concern isn't really about job loss or efficiency. It's about meaning. She spent years learning to bake. Developing intuition, making mistakes, building skill through repetition. The breads, pies, cakes, ice creams, croissants, etc. she makes carries all of that. If a machine can produce something indistinguishable, what happens to the thing that made it worth doing? For her, the struggle is the point. AI doesn't only change the output; it removes the thing that made the work meaningful in the first place.
I see it differently. Not because I think she's wrong, but because I start from a different place. To me, the human is still directing the work. The vision, the judgement, and the intent are still all human-derived. A chef using a stand mixer isn't less of an artist than the one kneading by hand (a hot take among professional bakers I'm sure). What matters is what you're trying to create and why, not whether you invented every tool in the process. I'm drawn to the possibility of automating things we don't need to do so we can focus on the problems that actually require human creativity and ingenuity.
One topic we ended up getting stuck on is whether AI-assisted art is art. I tend to think yes. It's a tool, and tools don't diminish the person wielding them. She tends to think no. Or at least, not in the same way. If the machine is doing the part that used to require human skill, something essential has been lost.
We didn't resolve it. I'm not sure it's resolvable. But the conversation surfaced a sense that this matters, that it's moving fast, and that the people making the biggest decisions aren't necessarily asking the right questions.
Which leads to the harder problem. We're obviously not in control of where this goes. The choices that shape how AI develops (what it's optimized for, who benefits, what gets preserved and what gets discarded) are being made by a small number of companies, institutions, and individuals with their own incentives. And we are not in those rooms.
So what does it look like to contribute positively when you're not the one steering? What can two people, or a small community of people, actually do?
We don't have a clear answer yet. But I have a suspicion that it starts with learning. Building things, even small things, to understand how this technology works and what it's capable of. Staying honest about what I find. Documenting the process so others can learn from it, or challenge it, or build on it.
For most of my career I've carried ideas to build. Products, apps, tools, small experiments. They lived in notebooks, todo lists, and conversations, occasionally making it as far as a no-code prototype before running into the limits of what I knew how to do. The distance between having an idea and making it real has always required either years of technical study or the resources to hire someone who has already invested those years.
That distance seems to be compressing.
Not uniformly, and definitely not without tradeoffs, but in ways that feel meaningfully different from what came before. For the first time, someone without engineering training (someone with curiosity and clear thinking) can build functional things. Working products.
I want to be careful here. I'm not making a case for replacing expertise. The most valuable work still emerges from skilled humans using tools that extend what they're capable of. But the barrier between imagination and execution has shifted, and that changes who gets to participate in shaping what gets built.
I'm starting this project because I want to explore those questions rather than waiting for someone else to answer them. I want to build things in public, write honestly about what I learn, and document both what works and what doesn't. I want to take my wife's concerns seriously, as a real question about what we might be losing.
Seattle is home. It's a city that has been at the center of technological change before, and it has lived with the consequences. I'm hoping to find others who are sitting with these same questions, who believe that small, honest work still matters even when the larger forces feel beyond our control.
I'm not sure what we can do. But I think the answer probably involves learning, building, and paying attention.
That's the starting point.
— Austin