I opened a terminal for the first time last week.
I finally decided to take a crack at something that had been sitting on my to-do list forever: building a personal website. I’d always assumed it would be a heavy lift, but after some Youtube videos and X rabbit holes, I built up the confidence to start.
What surprised me was how much detail I could actually control. I had something in my head, and I could describe it, tweak it, and iterate on it quickly enough to get surprisingly close.
I was writing prompts, watching things compile, pushing updates to GitHub, fixing errors I didn’t fully understand, and somehow… making progress.
It was exhilarating.
Also a little disorienting. Not necessarily in a scary way. More like - If I can do this, can’t anybody?
You Can Do More Than Ever Before
It’s incredible how quickly we’re able to do things now with AI. But at the same time that ability means there is more stuff. More to consume. More output.
When the ability to produce things — websites, decks, copy, code — was relatively scarce, it carried real value. AI has moved that side of the equation dramatically. If supply keeps rising, the price of output keeps falling. For most of the last decade, effort was a decent proxy for value. If you put in the work, things tended to move forward. Now that relationship feels looser.
From Things to Systems
Using tools like Claude Code doesn’t make you an expert overnight. But it does change what’s possible. If I, and my limited technical background, can hack together a website that I’m proud of, then really anybody can. And when that happened, something subtle shifted in my thinking.
I’ve landed on this idea that value is moving up a level from designing things to designing systems. What feels scarce today is knowing what’s worth building, having a point of view on how it should look and work, and having the relationships that make anyone care once it exists. Instead of "can you build a website?" the question really should be "does it do anything? Does it lead somewhere? Does it connect to something that compounds?" I can get a site live faster than I ever could have imagined. What I don't automatically get is traffic, engagement, or opportunity. That still has to be designed.
The same is true for quality. You can tell when something is purely AI generated. There’s something always just slightly off, and you know it immediately. The output exists, but the human judgment that makes it actually good doesn't come for free. That's still the work.
Output without a system is just noise. Where are people coming from? What do they do next? Does anything happen when they see it?
When You Can Do More
The shift from execution to judgment is the real change.
When you can do more, faster, with fewer constraints, the question stops being "can I build this?" and starts being "what would make this matter?"
I keep hearing versions of this from friends and colleagues too. For most of our lives we've been taught that hard work pays off. Output led to outcomes. Long hours meant more money. More cold calling meant more sales. This made sense when output was scarce. Now, output is abundant.
Where Things Might Be Going
So where do you focus to achieve a desired outcome going forward? I'm still wrestling with what this all means, which is partially why I sat down to write.
A few things feel directionally true: tools will keep getting better, output will keep increasing, and the gap between idea and execution will keep shrinking. Getting the site live was the easy part. Now I'm staring at zero traffic, and that problem requires something completely different — who's it for, how do they find it, what do they do when they get there. It’s still on me to make those calls.
The output can be world class, but it still travels through people. The things that are hardest to fake — trust, relationships, real world presence — those end up being the most durable advantage of all. No tool has figured out how to replicate that yet. The irony is that in a world of infinite digital output, showing up in person might be the highest leverage thing you can do.
For now, I'm planning on continuing to develop good judgment on what's worth spending time on, and building systems that allow the output to compound over time.
Building the website was fun. Genuinely. It made me want to make more things, try more ideas, and move faster. My imagination was sparked.
That feels like a good thing.
At the same time, it made me realize that the hard part isn't going to be making things anymore. It's going to be deciding what's worth making, and what to do with it once it exists.
-Alec
1/52