I can’t believe it’s already 2026. I still remember writing my first posts about AI image generation back in 2022 and 2023. Time has flown, and the industry has accelerated in a way that’s hard to fully grasp. Styling images has come a long way.
Image cohesion has improved drastically. I can both learn from others prompts, but also carefully piece together an idea for a visual and the models do a good job of filling in the gaps. It has inspired me to continue to progress in my manual art practice, with my paintings and drawings improving with rapid ideation. It’s like scrolling art styles on crack and getting inspired so fast.
Additionally, I can generate styles that stick to a ‘look’ or series of visual parameters. I have been having not only a lot of fun with this, but I have been training myself on how to cleanly define what I want to be common between different outputs while making sure the variables allow for all kinds of outputs.
This has been a really fun way to practice the skill. I’m doing something similar in my day job. I also apply this across my side projects for the types of things I build.
If you check out the wish list under my name on this site, you’ll see one example. I used AI to build a WordPress plugin that keeps a database of things I like, all organized in a simple wish list format. I even built a clean bookmarklet and an admin dashboard around it. And you know what’s great about it? It’s not riddled with ads. It’s not using some stupid algorithm to make money over providing me with the base functionality I really want. It doesn’t have a bunch of unnecessary tracking garbage all over it that sells both your and my information because you looked at it. I am so pleased to have the option to step away from large corporate information-sucking tools.
That’s the kind of project I would’ve struggled to make time for before. Not because it was beyond my ability, but because it required sustained effort across too many steps. Now, I can define the requirements, set clear guardrails around the tech stack and structure, and let the AI handle the execution.
That shift matters more than the output. I no longer have to choose between building things for myself and having a life outside of work. I can still spend time gardening, seeing friends, or working out, while my ideas continue to take shape in the background.
I think the takeaway is really that my hobbies and downtime aren’t competing as much with my projects anymore. That’s a huge win for how my life works day-to-day. In a few more months to years, I expect to be back with more information on how things are changing for me, for us, but in the meantime, I look forward to building and building more.
A few thoughts on AI in other spaces…
Right now, I’m speaking my thoughts out loud using a tool called VoiceMod. It turns my voice into structured writing based on a set of instructions I’ve given it. It doesn’t change what I mean, but it makes the process dramatically faster. It handles grammar, pauses, and even those moments where I correct myself mid-thought. The result is usually very close to what I was trying to say, just cleaner.
That experience reflects something bigger. AI has quietly worked its way into nearly every part of my daily life. As a software engineer, there’s really no avoiding it. In many ways, it came out of our field and is now reshaping it.
What’s changed isn’t that AI can do things I couldn’t do before. It’s that it has changed how I do them. The best way I can describe it is this: I used to feel like a bricklayer, carefully placing each piece by hand. Now it feels like I’ve built a machine that lays the bricks for me, exactly the way I would have, based on the rules and structure I define. I can step back and think about the next thing while the current one continues building behind me.
It’s not just about speed, either. These tools can process information in real time, pulling from sources like weather, markets, or other data streams. With local models, you can even keep that process private and controlled. The overall effect is that it has shifted my role. I’m less involved in the manual execution and more focused on the parts I actually care about.
Of course, there are downsides. There always are when something this foundational changes how we operate.
I think about the agricultural revolution. It enabled human progress, but it also erased vast stretches of wild land. The tradeoff was real and irreversible.
The same is true of the Industrial Revolution. It’s easy to point to it as the origin of most of our modern pollution problems. At the same time, our current way of life depends on what it created, and we’re now building cleaner versions of those systems. Still, some of the damage from that earlier era of manufacturing and automation can’t be undone.
So I have mixed feelings about it — but I also know that the cat is out of the bag. That rapid progress will have to evolve around environmental mitigation strategies. We will need to find ways to use our skills and thoughts and not lose them to AI. I have to evolve to avoid being left behind but also that I want to evolve at each new step because the promise of achieving more things than before, accelerating what I can learn, and practicing things I am truly interested in more rapidly is so intense.
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