Reflections in the Fog of Flu
I'm writing this while sick with the flu. Not the romantic kind of sick where you drink tea and stare thoughtfully out the window. The real kind. Congested, tired, and slightly delirious. It's the sort of sickness that turns your brain into a foggy hallway where every thought echoes a little too long.
Which is maybe the perfect state of mind to think about AI.
Because what these tools can do now, especially on the coding side, is far closer to autonomous than most people seem willing to admit. We're talking about systems that can troubleshoot, iterate, build, repair, and improvise. The only thing holding them back from acting like fully independent developers isn't capability. It's constraint.
Guardrails.
And that's the part that matters.
People keep imagining AI as this runaway train barreling toward some dystopian oligarchy where five corporations own the world and everyone else is a disposable worker-drone. Maybe that fear isn't irrational, but it feels incomplete. Because what I'm seeing, personally, is the opposite effect: a democratization of capability.
This site is proof of it.
I've been building it through what people are starting to call vibe coding, a term for the practice of directing AI to write and revise code through natural language, iterating on feel and instinct rather than formal programming knowledge. You describe what you want. The AI attempts it. You push back, redirect, try again. It's less like writing code and more like having a conversation with someone who happens to speak fluent JavaScript.
And it works.
Significant revisions to this entire project are now limited mainly by my imagination and my willingness to keep pushing through the frustration. I don't need a web design firm. I don't need a coding bootcamp. I don't need a decade of experience. I need curiosity, persistence, and enough stubbornness to keep asking until something clicks.
That is not a small shift. That is a fundamental redistribution of power.
And yes, there are still barriers. There are still gatekeepers. But the old gate, the one that required years of specialized training just to get your foot in the door, is cracked open now. Permanently.
The same thing has happened before.
When the cotton gin was introduced, many believed it would reduce the need for labor. The logic seemed obvious: faster processing meant less work. But the opposite happened. Cotton became vastly more profitable. Production expanded. Demand exploded. And instead of labor decreasing, it increased, brutally, catastrophically, and at industrial scale.
That's the irony of most labor-saving inventions: they don't erase work, they reshape incentives. They make something cheaper, which makes it scalable, which makes the system hungry for more.
AI will do something similar. It will eliminate certain kinds of work, but it will also create new markets, new forms of creativity, and new categories of labor that don't exist yet. And because economics is ultimately a pressure system, I suspect the current panic will self-correct. The incentives will shift. The culture will adapt. The equilibrium will return, even if the landscape looks different.
Right now, we are in the ugly part of the transition.
People are obsessed with AI slop, and honestly, I understand why. It's everywhere. Low-effort content. Generic images. Hollow writing. Fake profundity. The internet feels like it's being flooded with synthetic noise.
But that reaction isn't new. It's the same reaction people have always had when a creative tool becomes available to everyone. The volume increases. The average quality drops. The gatekeepers panic. The critics sneer. The public gets overwhelmed.
Then, slowly, the filters evolve.
Twenty years ago, YouTube was mostly slop too. And in many ways it still is. But the algorithms adjusted. The audience matured. The best material rose because it had to. People gravitate toward quality eventually, the way water settles and separates itself from debris.
The slop doesn't disappear. It just stops being the whole story.
And the same will happen here.
The current obsession with pointing out AI garbage is a predictable historical reflex, one more repetition of the same cycle: new tool, mass adoption, cultural noise, moral panic, gradual refinement. It isn't a sign that everything is collapsing. It's a sign that something is being born.
As for this blog, don't expect refinement.
This is not where the polished work will rise.
This is where the rough drafts live. The experiments. The half-formed ideas. The strange collisions between mysticism and software, between design and delirium, between curiosity and whatever it is that keeps me building things while sick in bed.
It will remain messy on purpose.
Because that's how I create.
And if anything is going to survive this next era, AI, art, culture, humanity, it won't be the tidy things.
It will be the true ones.