This Is the Moment We'll Talk About Later
Thoughts about Matt Shumer's 'Somthing Big is Happening' post
A few days ago, Matt Shumer wrote something that over 65 million people have read. It said everything I’ve been thinking, everything I’ve been trying to tell the people closest to me, and it broke something open in me. I don’t write about my beliefs. I don’t make my opinions public. But I need my friends and my family to understand what’s coming, and I can’t afford to stay comfortable anymore.
For most of my adult life, I haven’t been big on sharing my beliefs. They’re mine, and I think other people’s beliefs are theirs. That philosophy extends to just about everything, but especially the charged stuff. Politics, religion, the things that turn dinner tables into battlefields. My family knows certain topics are off limits and that’s just how it is.
What I didn’t realize until recently is that AI has become one of those polarizing conversations.
Only this time, I have a lot to say. And I have a passion and a spark here unmatched by anything else in my lifetime.
• • •
I spend ten to twelve hours a day inside AI models. I work with my own LLMs. I work inside Claude Code, ChatGPT, Gemini. I write my own systems. I have a master’s degree in AI. I wouldn’t call myself a coder, though. I consider myself a creator. And the things I can create now in a single prompt are mind-blowing, even to me.
My first solution for any problem, and I don’t care what it is, is to talk to my LLM. What do I need to buy? What does this blood test mean? How do I build this system? How do I compare these data points? Not because the AI has the answers. Because when I bring my problems, my instincts, my half-formed ideas to the table, what comes back is sharper, deeper, and more complete than anything I could produce alone.
I use Claude Code to write my code and Codex to test it. I have them duel each other. I’m not loyal to any one company. I’m loyal to the technology itself and to the belief that it’s advancing our world in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
And I don’t just build with these tools at work. I live inside them. I’m standing up private language models on dedicated machines, loaded with my own life data, with agentic searches running through and organizing every corner of my world. Emails, documents, schedules, decisions, all of it flowing through systems I’ve built to keep my life running.
The most important files in my entire system aren’t code. They’re documents I wrote to teach my models who I am. My values, my voice, the way I think and work. Every model reads them before we begin, and by the time I type my first prompt, we’re already aligned.
And that’s the part most people don’t understand yet. These tools are teachable. You can shape them to work with you, not generically, but specifically, personally, in the way you think and operate. I’m not a coder. I’ve never called myself one. But with the release of models like Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex, there is no domain I can’t cross. Matt Shumer wrote about the sheer breadth of jobs being reshaped by this technology, and he’s right. But what I’d add is this: the walls between disciplines are dissolving. You don’t need a degree in something to build something extraordinary within it. You need curiosity, a problem worth solving, and a model that knows how to meet you where you are. The only thing limiting any of us now is our ability to imagine what’s possible.
I can build entire websites in minutes. Entire systems in hours. I’ve stopped asking “can I?” The answer is always yes. The only limit left is whether I can imagine it.
• • •
But in the last couple of months, the awe has started sharing space with something else entirely.
I’m watching my world change with a speed and consistency that’s becoming impossible to ignore. Each new model, each new enhancement, modifies my thinking and my way of doing things. I used to worry about hallucination. Now I worry about something else entirely. The work that comes out of these sessions is so aligned with how I think that I can barely find the seam between my contribution and theirs. I don’t know if that’s exhilarating or terrifying. Most days it’s both. And I sit with the weight of what that actually means.
I’ve had several conversations recently with friends who aren’t following AI. I’m kind of mind-blown, because this is all I ever do. They don’t know that Anthropic and OpenAI just released two of the most powerful models the world has ever seen, practically on top of each other. They don’t know that those models aren’t just tools anymore. They’re building themselves. Enhancing themselves. Publishing their own updates. The technology is now improving the technology, and the pace is accelerating in ways that should stop every one of us in our tracks.
The entire world is changing right in front of us, and I’m shocked at how many people don’t see it.
• • •
In October, I left a job I loved because I knew product was dying. Product management and software development are about to become entwined in ways we don’t even have words for yet. Today, one chat session can yield a multi-page BRD so perfect it leads to a prompt that gets you a working application in a single session. Good enough for a proof of concept. And you’re no more than a few hours away from making it almost production ready.
We’re limited only by resources, compliance, regulation, and fear. We’re no longer limited by ability.
If you can dream it, you can build it. And anyone who isn’t using AI is falling behind.
• • •
I’ve never been a big fan of math, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about exponents. My son and I play Magic: The Gathering, and there’s this card that does a doubling thing every time you play a spell. The first time you do it, it’s two, then four, then eight, then sixteen, and on and on. Every time he plays that stupid card, all I can think about is: that’s how AI is. A few years ago it didn’t even exist. And today it’s writing itself.
Every day I worry that the gap between those of us who are using it and those of us who aren’t is getting so large it’s almost uncrossable.
I know my AI is smarter than me. I’ve made my peace with that. But smart isn’t everything. These tools don’t know what matters to the people sitting across the table from me. They don’t know which problem to solve first or why it keeps a team lead up at night. I do. And that’s what I bring. The human judgment, the ability to connect these tools to real problems for real people. I spend countless hours learning, growing, pushing into new territory within these worlds. Not to keep pace with the technology. Because I refuse to let it outgrow my ability to lead it.
• • •
When I read it Matt Shumer’s article, it put a punctuation mark on everything I’ve been feeling. I kept stopping and thinking, that’s exactly what I just said last week. That’s exactly what I was trying to explain to a friend who looked at me like I was losing my mind.
He wrote:
The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it’s too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that’s wisdom or rationalization, I don’t know.
It’s one of the most powerful paragraphs I’ve read in a long time. Because that’s the truth nobody is saying out loud. The people closest to this technology aren’t just optimistic. They’re shaken. And they’re building anyway. That tension is what the rest of the world needs to understand.
• • •
130 million people watched the Super Bowl. I was one of them. And whether the rest of you realized it or not, you watched the future arrive during the commercial breaks. Nearly a quarter of every ad that aired, 15 out of 66, featured AI in some way. It was the single largest thematic category in Super Bowl advertising history. AI companies collectively spent an estimated $200 to $300 million to be in front of 130 million viewers for 30 seconds at a time. That’s not a trend. That’s a declaration.
Anthropic, the company behind Claude and one of my most valued tools, ran its first Super Bowl ad. And while the ads were funny, they felt so incredibly out of character for the company I’ve come to know and love. But the more I think about it, maybe that’s exactly the point. Only 7% of consumers even knew Claude existed before that night. These companies aren’t advertising because they want your attention. They’re advertising because they know what’s coming, and they need you to be ready for it before it gets here. And what’s coming is this: the way we work, the way we create, the way we solve problems, the way entire industries operate is being rewritten. Not in ten years. Not in five. Right now, in real time, faster than any of us can fully absorb.
• • •
The most dramatic change I’ve witnessed in my lifetime was COVID. The world stopped. Schools closed. We figured out how to work from our kitchen tables and see our parents through windows. It was disorienting and unprecedented and it reshaped everything. The pandemic eventually ended, but it left a lasting mark on our society, on entire generations, in ways we’re still understanding. Not all of that change was bad.
But AI is bigger. Not because it’s a crisis. Because there’s no horizon to it. There’s no point where we come out the other side and assess the impact. This is a permanent shift in what’s possible, who can do it, and how fast it happens. An impactful change is imminent. And not enough of us are talking about it.
• • •
The best thing I can do right now is encourage the people I care about to invest $20 a month in one of these tools. Pick one. Gemini, OpenAI, or Anthropic. Buy the subscription and use it.
Use it for something you’re passionate about. Have it teach you. Fix something for you. Help you. I have friends who fixed their cars, made better purchasing decisions, solved medical problems. Last week I had it build me a Magic: The Gathering deck, actually logging into my deck box system, building the deck, and publishing the deck list.
Give it something complicated in your life and ask it for suggestions. Something you’ve been stuck on. Something that feels too big or too tangled to figure out alone. That’s where these tools shine. Not on trivia. On the hard stuff. Spend time understanding this technology, not because it’s a novelty, but because it’s becoming the foundation of how the world operates. Don’t be caught completely unaware.
• • •
I don’t often put my opinions out there. It’s actually incredibly rare. But I think something big is happening. And I want the people who read my blog, all eight of you, to know.
Read Matt Shumer’s post: Something Big Is Happening. It’s long. It’s probably the most important thing I’ve read this year.