Late January was when it happened for me. Ever since I installed Clawdbot (aka Moltbot and finally OpenClaw), I’ve been swimming in the river that is AI in 2026.

I went out and bought a Mac Mini the day after I first installed OpenClaw.
My Mac Mini before it moved into the "server cubby" in my home office.
SpinupTUI is an application I built to manage my fleet of servers and websites that I host.
I used Claude to build a Playdate port of one of my favorite games from the 80s.
This is a mockup of a web app I'm currently building.

Every week (every day even) I’m discovering new tools and building new software for running my business and helping my clients. This week was no different. Here are some of the highlights:

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

The AI Doc - or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

On Wednesday’s bi-weekly Webmaster Backup Alliance Zoom, Nic mentioned this documentary. I started watching it during my lunch break, and I was glued.

The film is Daniel Roher’s quest to understand AI and its impacts. Are we engineering the apocalypse? Is the Singularity nigh? What happens when AI takes our jobs? Should we be having kids?

A parade of AI luminaries comes to his studio for a sit-down directly in front of the cameras. The intimacy is gripping. We get to experience Roher’s grappling with this new world we’re all living in.

Highly recommended, 5 out of 5 ⭐

Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote – DHH

I came across David Heinemeier Hansson’s (aka DHH) Rails World 2026 Keynote Thursday morning before work. Two minutes in and I knew I’d be late to the office.

If you write code for a living, DHH’s presso lands like a Molotov cocktail. Any notion you have of going back to how we did things last year or even a couple of months ago, that’s all awash in the inferno that is agentic coding sweeping through our industry. I’ve felt it, you’ve felt it, it’s an absolute wildfire.

As the owner of a small shop, I love it. I’m not sure where we’re headed, but the ride is exhilarating. For me it started on Sunday, January 25. X was all abuzz about Clawdbot (i.e. OpenClaw). A mere fifteen minutes after setup, I had it outperforming my human VA by 10X. A recurring business process of mine that normally took ten to fourteen hours now only took one.

Since that snowy January evening, this year has been one personal inflection point after another. I’ve since moved on from agent harnesses like OpenClaw in favor of using Codex/Claude Code directly. Meanwhile I’ve been writing software in new programming languages, building out my own infrastructure whenever inspiration strikes, and easily servicing my clients with ever more elegant and personalized solutions. Hyperbole aside, if you write code for a living, this year is a golden era as we sit at the forefront of a technological revolution.

SpinupTUI v1.0.0

SpinupTUI - a TUI for managing your SpinupWP fleet

Back in late June, I tried my hand at developing my first 100% agentically coded app. The result was SpinupTUI, a terminal user interface for managing servers and sites on the SpinupWP platform.

Inspired by DHH’s keynote, I was finally able to hit my v1.0.0 backlog. Prior to that, I’d issued 42 v0.X.X releases.

Now with the one-dot-oh release, SpinupTUI is my daily driver when it comes to managing my sites and servers. This past week there was a critical vulnerability discovered in WordPress Core requiring an immediate update. SpinupTUI allowed me to quickly update my 150+ WordPress sites en masse.

Further Reflections on this Moment

This moment in AI certainly captures the experience of 2026 for me. The pace of advance is frenetic. I feel like any time I open X, I’m going to come across some revolutionary software release, a new technique for using AI, or an insight that will materially affect how I work. I have to summon all my faculties just to stay focused on the things that matter most.

Just yesterday I found myself reflecting fondly on a workday filled with just coding. I don’t want to go back to the old way of coding-by-hand, but I do see the merit and satisfaction that comes from hours at the keyboard grinding away at a problem. AI has largely replaced that discipline. Now I’m managing my own army of always-on software engineers ready to implement my ideas as soon as I’m ready to describe them. I feel like I’ve 10Xed my capacity and 100Xed my capability. It’s truly an amazing time to be alive.

Written with Omawrite on an old Intel MacBook I set up with Omarchy Linux this past weekend. To handle syncing my post to and from WordPress, I wrote Omawrite-WordPress.