Oh, Crap: Computers Can Do the Amazing Stuff We Always Wanted

Everything, everywhere, all at once. That’s what the last couple months have felt like. Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for people in my line of work, everything changed over the holiday break of 2025. We all left for some much-needed time off, and when we returned, the plates had shifted under our feet. Not a tremor, flutter, or false alarm, but a full, global, Richter-scale needle-pegged event.

A month-and-a-half later, these are the sorts of comments I’m hearing daily:

“We’re cooked."
"It’s over."
"It’s so over.”

I don’t have to tell you what we’re talking about. You know. We all know. And we’re all thinking about it.

In the last few weeks, I, and likely you, and many, many others reading this, built multiple apps using Claude Code. Forking out $200/month for a tech product has never been this easy. It’s like having a multi-disciplinary developer on my payroll at all times, 24 hours a day.

This is not a fad: it’s sea change.

I’m old enough to know that we’ll soon look back on this phase with longing and remember-whens. We’re in a digital gold rush, and it will only be like this once. We have a short window to exploit it while the powers-that-be are leaning on venture capital, before the gates go up, the prices rise, and our freedom is curtailed.

Development, design, project management, devops, research, and product development are all in completely uncharted waters. And that’s just the technology industry.

Executives and operations professionals are frantically analyzing the numbers, not simply for the sake of facing herd-thinning, but because the fundamentals of business pricing, fees, and costs are changing. Things that took a certain amount of time are taking a lot less time.

Time is money, but so is proprietary knowledge.

Well, it used to be, anyway.

Isn’t this what we always wanted, though? When R2D2 saved Luke, Han, and Leia in the garbage compactor, didn’t you wish you had a plucky robot assistant, too?

Excuse me, but it wasn’t Luke fixing those vaporators. He was managing bots.

Luke was vibe farming.

When he climbed into the X-Wing for a side quest to Dagobah, he didn’t pull out a calculator, compass, and a slide rule to crunch a bunch of numbers and use his celestial navigation skills.

He had R2 do it.

Right now, I have my own R2 unit. Its name is Claude.

We’re at the beginning of what we always wanted. And it’s freaking us right out. The disruption is terribly noticeable. We’re all collectively unsure of what comes next.

Is it going to be Star Wars, Wall-E, or Terminator?

Somewhere in my parent’s house, I promise you, there’s a bookshelf with copies of the manual for Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Probably weighs about six pounds. Next to it is a heftier tome that tells you everything you ever wanted to know about Windows 98.

Do you like navigating file menus? Submenus? Do you like seeing the Help menu item over to the top right, knowing full well it’s the most worthless menu item in the history of the world?

Do you miss defragging hard drives? Do you like hard drives? I know there are those of you that do. And part of me gets it.

I’m scared, too. But also exhilarated. I’m in multiple parts right now: a frightened boy, but also an extremely intrigued explorer.

We’re finally breaking the pull of the first era of human computational gravity.