I think we are living in a genuinely interesting time. The capabilities of the tools in our hands are remarkable.
With intent, and with an approach, a strategy, a methodology that properly supports that intent, making something becomes a pleasure, and we get to see the results faster. I am not going to argue here that seeing results quickly has some corrosive effect on the process. I do not feel we have the luxury of giving that kind of time to every single part of life.
Anyway, the real point is the sense of limitlessness in what you can do with an agentic tool, Claude Code or Codex, using a handful of tools. For the last two hundred years humanity has felt a steadily growing freedom in knowing and in doing, and every generation feels it in its own way. The generation that comes next cannot feel exactly what the one before it felt, but I think it shares the freedom at the core of it.
As someone born into the internet, I remember what my father felt about it and the way he described it. I felt free too, of course, but I had no experience of what came before. Right now it feels to me like I am feeling exactly what my father felt when he was young. Professionally, agents are enormously useful to me, and they have changed the way we work. But when I use them for the things I want to do in ordinary life, I still find myself astonished.
- Health: tracking my own health data and running analyses on it
- Longevity
- Video edits for the channel I want to build on social media
- Asking for perspective on historical context
- Cross-context conversations about etymology and linguistics
The list is long. From literature to video editing to simply getting a perspective on something, I feel a good kind of change, and it gives me a deep pleasure.
I feel the difference most in language learning. Normally I like learning a language through its grammar and reading its good writing, and that process is a mental conversation between me, the book and myself. Now, thanks to the agents I have built with my own skills, I can have an actual conversation, and even shift the accent while speaking. That has been a lovely experience.
Being able to get this far by opening a terminal and an agent inside it, at different points in life, gives me a curious sense of freedom. The reason I want to share it is that I think most people are feeling the same thing.
With each new development, intelligence becoming a resource we have at hand seems to widen the horizon for all of us as humans, or let us say for those of us with some ambition. We take one more step forward as a species. I wonder what the generation after me, and the ones after that, will get to experience.
For now, once again, when I pick up my morning coffee and sit down in front of my computer, I say it to myself: what a time to be alive.