Coding After AI: Everyone's a Junior Developer Again

In this talk I explore how AI is fundamentally changing the way we build software. I start with “Omni,” an experiment in creating an ambient AI virtual colleague that sits alongside your team, always available to help brainstorm, prototype, and ship. From there I zoom out to the bigger picture: we have gone from punch cards to assembly to high-level languages, and now natural language is becoming the interface to code. Every developer, regardless of seniority, is essentially learning to work with a new junior colleague that never sleeps.

The core argument is that AI is a force multiplier, especially for small teams and generalists. I call this the “AI Renaissance” – a moment where a single creative technologist can operate across design, code, infrastructure, and content simultaneously, because AI fills the gaps in expertise. The traditional divide between specialist and generalist is collapsing.

I walk through what I call the Innovation Playbook: it starts with voice memo brain dumps to capture raw ideas, moves into structured context building where you teach AI your domain, and culminates in MCP tool use where AI agents connect directly to your APIs, databases, and deployment pipelines. The result is a workflow where the bottleneck shifts from “can we build this?” to “should we build this?” – and that is a much better problem to have.