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AI: What You Need to Know, 2026

There is still time, but there's not much choice: AI is here.

If you're a developer who's been watching from the sidelines, waiting for things to "settle down" or for the hype cycle to fade, I have bad news: they settled. It's not fading.

The reason is simple: money. Time is money, and people are saving a lot of it using AI. They're also saving time. They're moving faster, shipping faster, and businesses are not waiting.

You don't need to take my word for it - just have a search. Or maybe when your family or non-techie friends ask you which model works the best with OpenClaw (yep, happened to me)... that's when it will hit you.

It's Here. Time to Move.

I made this video because I kept having the same conversation. Smart, experienced developers, people with 10, 15, 20 years of shipping real software, telling me they hadn't really started yet. They'd played with ChatGPT. Maybe asked it to write a regex. But they hadn't built anything with it. They hadn't felt that moment where the tooling clicks and you realize your entire workflow and career just changed.

Often it's because they hate AI "in principle" and don't want to touch it. Yeah they know about it, and yeah they know what context rot is and yeah yeah yeah. It's all a bunch of Silicon Valley wankers doing wankery things...

This is unfortunate. These people will be out of a job, very soon. And for what reason? This is a business, not a cathedral. It's also not a university campus where we get to debate philosophy. This is an extremely high-yield, deep pockets industry and if you haven't noticed: it tends to be a bit fluid in terms of ethics and morality.

Either way: I'm not going to sell you on AI. If you're here looking for a debate, you're in the wrong place. I don't have the energy nor the interest. What I will do is show you, in about 30 minutes, how to go from zero to building something real. Not a toy. Not a demo. Something you'd actually put on the internet.

We'll install Claude Code, set up a project, and build a personal landing page from scratch. Along the way, you'll pick up the habits that separate people who are productive with AI from people who are frustrated by it: how to manage your context window, when to clear your session, why you should never start coding without a plan.

This is genuinely fun. The kind of fun where you lose a Saturday afternoon and don't notice. The kind of fun where you get to build the thing you've always wanted to, but just haven't had time. A side hustle maybe, or that fun startup idea. You can do 10 of those in a weekend, and maybe one will hit!

You'll feel it about 10 minutes into the video, when Claude starts building our stuff and you realize you're not watching a tutorial. You're watching your job description change in real time.

The video is free. I have a lot more where that came from and, given the speed of AI tooling, I can now create a lot more of these (I use it for editing, never for scripting).

If you want to go deeper after watching, I invite you to join my premium users in learning all of the goodness that this changeover is bringing. I keep it positive here, and I also keep it real.

Why The AI Guarantee?

There are good ways to use AI, and there are "bad" ways. To me, the stuff that is repetitive, boring, and rote are perfect candidates for using AI. Things like:

  • Moving data around (ETL, database queries, etc)
  • General knowledge management. Sorting notes, discovery, mining business data.
  • General coding. I used to think that writing the logic is where AI isn't so great, but that's changing now that these models can learn as quickly as they can. I haven't written code in ages, and I don't see myself doing much more of it.
  • Summarizing things. Emails, spreadsheets, articles, etc. It's great at this.
  • Investigation and research. Amazing to be able to compile a ton of knowledge within minutes and then have it sorted and presented.
  • Rough editing text and videos. Vocabulary and spelling checks, tone checks, and removal of gaps, flubs, and so on.

What AI is not good at is:

  • Anything involving human connection. These words I'm writing here and now; this is me giving my time to you. You're worth my time!
  • Anything involving creativity. AI can connect quite a few dots, but true inspiration is something completely different. The creative bits are the fun bits, and making videos is a creative outlet for me. As is writing. That's why I do it all by hand - it's my work.

I do use AI to help me think through things, however. I might have an idea, and I'll use a skill like brainstorming or inspire-me to help me think laterally. I might even ask for a general outline following a flow that I like - but after that - all the words are mine.

Completely.

So, in summary: I do these things because they are human, and it feels good to be human, man.

Rob