The shape underneath all of them
Stare long enough and the same curve keeps reappearing. A technology starts as a cutting-edge tool — military, research, a handful of obsessed enthusiasts. Then a niche company drags it toward ordinary people. Consumers pick it up, enterprises follow, it expands until everyone's using it without noticing — and then, eventually, it declines. Sometimes it refuses to climb. Sometimes it refuses to die. But it always starts somewhere small.
The champions
Each wave had someone who carried it across the gap. Microsoft championed the desktop — keyboard, mouse, a graphical world after the terminal. IBM rode the mainframe, with redundancy as a first principle; it never really declined — thousands of shops still run production on it. Apple championed mobile and the hardware revolution. Google and Amazon championed the cloud — Kubernetes, then enterprise-ready everything. Meta championed the app, building things so good we couldn't look away. And now, with AI, the incumbents who sat on it for years are being challenged into the open by ChatGPT and Claude.
Where I'm standing
If I locate myself honestly on the AI wave, I'm at the early-adopter edge — me, my company, my team — genuinely floored by what it can do, and standing at a crossroads of reinventing our roles, our work, ourselves. What comes next looks like mass consumer AI, then mass enterprise AI: products simple enough for anyone, if there's real meat here. Tokens, power, cost — all real problems. But as a species we've always found a way to make the next wave sustainable.
I'm a small fish in a very large ocean — but the ship has sailed, and I'd rather get my hands dirty than watch from the shore.
So I'm not approaching this from optimism or pessimism. I'm approaching it from wonder. If building just got easier, what's left for humans to do? How do we internalize this? How do we inspire the next million people to learn? The only way to conquer anything is by doing it. So I'm standing here — excited and a little anxious — watching the world unfold in front of me, asking the oldest question there is: okay… what next?