Manifesto
AI removes the boring. Everything that’s left — knowing what to build, who it’s for, and why it matters — still needs a human in the room. Ideally one who’s seen a few cycles.
The world is split today. Half the room is wildly excited about AI. The other half thinks it’s a fad that’ll never be good enough. One camp wants to fire everyone and replace them with agents. The other wants to ban it altogether.
I think the real win sits between those two camps — and almost nobody is selling from there.
Yes, AI killed coding, design, and copywriting as we knew them. It also opened a gap. A new opportunity, and a new role for us: more creative, more strategic, more human. It frees us to focus on the things that matter. The things only we can do. The things only some of us can do.
Anybody can build a website now. Not everybody can build the right website.
Because AI sees bits and pieces. It doesn’t see the big picture. It doesn’t carry the decades of operational scars, the intuition, the gut. It does work — pretty well — but it doesn’t do the thinking. The planning. The strategy. The vision. The human parts.
Or at least, not yet. Some things AI will probably get to eventually — recall, raw output speed, surface-level fluency in almost everything. Other things it may never get right: empathy, taste, common sense, ethics, humour, the deep understanding of how people actually behave when nobody’s watching. I’ll probably be retired by the time we find out which list is which.
And yes, I feel for the young generation. They have to compete with AI before they’ve had the chance to build the experience that makes a person irreplaceable. They struggle to find work, and when they do, they’re the first ones cut when a new “agent” or “skill” walks in. I feel for the older generation too — having to adapt to a new reality, learn new skills, find a new purpose with twenty years still on the clock.
I’m one of the lucky ones in the middle.
I spent almost two decades in telecom.
- Customer Support
- Customer Service Manager
- Vice President of OperationsRunning Business Development, Marketing, Customer Support and Tech Support at a large carrier.
- Big org, big scars.
- Burned out. Left.
- Built a VoIP mobile app.
- Sunk my teeth into the voice carrier industry.
- Came back to programming.My first love.
Programming is a different beast now than when I started 25+ years ago. It’s no longer about writing code. It’s about building systems. Designing architectures. Shaping products. Understanding the problem, the user, the market, the business. It’s about common sense, intuition, empathy. It’s about being a human in an AI world.
That’s the work I want to do. That’s the work Evo Bytes does.
AI is a tool. The big picture is still ours to draw. Until AGI shows up — and I’ll probably be retired by then — the edge is human judgement amplified by AI, not replaced by it.