I keep continuously seeing the argument that generative AI agents will improve people’s ability to write and ship more code. Therefore, through some odds and ends, we should theoretically see more non-profits or individual developers be able to manage and maintain social good software products.

Armed with good and our large goals, we go out to attack the harms and evils of the world. We do sometimes win. We sometimes do not. We look around at all of the evil that still swirls in the atmosphere above, and wonder how we could ever breathe well enough to survive through it. You have to wonder if good will ever be enough. As if good is a limited resource that we must convince people to do and to apply, or something we actively need to conjure in the right amounts as a salve to the evil of the world.

It seems unconscionable in this day and age where we keep on finding serial predators and wondering why we never uncovered them sooner, that a technology that does just that is gone.

I used to think making change was the thing. I used to believe that changing the world, dominating it and reshaping it in my hands was the goal. Now, I not only see how naive that is, but how many terrible things have been done in the name of changing the world. How many civilizations, companies, people, and products have tried. And what they left in their wake.

I’m doing something harder than restarting a company: forcing myself to take a break. Dreaming up technical diagrams could happen in my sleep, because that’s not the hard part to me. The true hard shit is knowing I have this immense desire that’s been burning since I was 13, and not seceding to it.