The web got really good at working. It's time we made it interesting again.
For the last few decades, we've become exceptionally good at making digital products fast, accessible, usable, secure and maintainable. All good things, all worth cherishing. But none of them were ever the point.
They were ways of getting closer to what we actually wanted: communicating something, helping someone, solving a problem or simply creating an experience. And now that we've laid much of that groundwork, perhaps it's time to focus on the message again.
The landscape changed. So what?
Artificial Intelligence (or Super Intelligence 😉) is making execution dramatically cheaper and
faster. Not just writing code, but turning ideas into solid working products. As someone who has
worked across design and development for over a decade I can tell the value of being able to do
both. Now that this combination is becoming the baseline, and getting supercharged in the
process, I'm more interested in what comes next.
The internet is reaching a
point we've seen before with cars. We've spent decades refining how it works, and now
much of that refinement is becoming the baseline. Which means we can return to the original,
more interesting question:
What are we actually trying to achieve?
Let's make something interesting
Beyond the profession
I grew up on the early web. I messed with Flash, experienced the questionable nature of LimeWire, changed Windows skins and generally poked at anything I could get my hands on. Over time, I got better at it. We all did. We learned what worked, what didn't, and why. Our digital world became faster, safer, more accessible and more reliable. Less weird, perhaps, but much better at what it was supposed to do.
But that experimental mindset never really disappeared. You see it in people building whimsical Linux themes, in brutalism finding its way back, and now in people vibe coding little tools just for themselves. I still do it too. Every few months I disappear into something new. The subject changes. The curiosity doesn't.