We had just finished jiu-jitsu. My friend said to me "you are very invested in Claude, no?" — then he told me about this financial prompt helper he had been using. And without really planning to, we started talking about Claude. At some point I started explaining how Claude Code works — not as a feature list, but as a way of thinking. How it can hold context across a whole problem. How knowing what it can't do is just as important as knowing what it can.

At some point he went quiet. It happened — he saw it. That moment when something clicks — not "oh that's cool" but "wait, this changes something."

We ended up talking about courses. I recommended the one that targets the real capability gap. Not the technology. The people using it.

That conversation stuck with me. Not because I taught him something. Because it reminded me where I am.

I've watched this happen before

I grew up in Ecuador. By the time I was a teenager, I had seen Beta Max come and go. VHS took over. Then Blu-ray. Then one day, Netflix existed and none of those things mattered anymore.

I'm 37. My generation didn't just witness one technological shift — we watched the whole tape get replaced, then the player, then the format, then the concept of owning media entirely.

And that was just entertainment. Then came the internet — and that was something else entirely. We made plans and trusted the other person would show up — no way to confirm, no way to reach them if they didn't. Landlines meant hoping whoever you were calling happened to be home. The Yellow Pages was how you found anyone. Then one day, Google Maps existed, everyone had a phone in their pocket, and the idea of being unreachable became almost quaint.

We adapted. Each time.

So when people ask me if I'm worried about AI — genuinely, no. Not because I'm naive about what it can do. But because I know what a transition looks like. I've lived through a few of them. This one is faster, and the stakes are different. But the shape is familiar.

You don't fight the wave. You learn how to surf it.

What floating actually feels like

I want to be honest about this: I'm not some AI maximalist who thinks everything is fine. The speed is real. The uncertainty is real. Some of what's coming, nobody fully understands yet.

But I'm floating. Not because I have all the answers — because I've stopped needing them before I move.

I found Claude Code. Not as a shortcut, but as a colleague. Something that helps me write more structured code, catch what I'm missing, think through problems from a different angle. It works because I bring the judgment. I know enough to direct it, evaluate it, push back on it. The tool amplifies what I already have.

That's the game. Not replacing what you know — but increasing the power of your knowledge.

And the more I use it, the more I realize the gap isn't between people who have AI and people who don't. It's between people who know how to guide it and people who are just watching it run.

A birthday, a date, and something unexpected

My wife is a front-end developer. She uses AI in her own work. She sits on the AI commission at her company — helping define how her organization approaches these tools at an institutional level.

She didn't need me to explain the technology. What she wanted was my take on how to use it properly — the criteria, the judgment, how to get real value out of it instead of just using it. That's what got her engaged.

And then something shifted. She started showing me things. New features I hadn't noticed. Shortcuts I wasn't using. Ways of working that her context had surfaced and mine hadn't.

Now it goes both ways.

There was a Claude event in Barcelona. I mentioned it — then hesitated, because it was also my birthday. She didn't hesitate. "Just go," she said — so I asked her to come with me.

What I expected: some presentations, a few things I probably already knew. What actually happened: a conversation we're still having. Not about features — about what it means to navigate the same moment from two different angles, and keep finding each other at the intersection.

There's something I love about the fact that "going to a tech event" and "going on a birthday date" ended up being the same night. And that it was one of the better ones.

What our generation was built for

I don't think we were unlucky to be born when we were. I think we were positioned.

We remember a world before the internet was everywhere. We learned to navigate change before we had a word for it. We've adapted enough times to know it's survivable — and interesting, if you let it be.

The AI revolution isn't happening to us. We're in it. Some of us are building it. All of us are being shaped by it.

I'd rather be the one surfing than the one waiting on the shore to see how it turns out.

Our generation is living exactly what it was supposed to live. Another historical moment. Another chance to adapt, to understand, to bring the humans forward with us.

Why not? It's what we've always done.

Worked with Claude (Anthropic) as thinking partner  ·  Apr 2026