We Are All Builders Now

I started painting around six years old. My heroes growing up were artists. Not athletes, not action figures, painters. I knew early on I wanted to be one known as a painter. And I was, into my thirties. The last year was the best of them all. Two sold out shows, international representation, forty paintings sold in that year.

Then due to global conditions it abruptly ended, and I had to decide what came next. During this confusing time in a conversation with my mother, she said something that reset my lens. She was a child developmental psychologist and an educator her entire career. Her work shaped the worldview of hundreds, possibly thousands of children. She repeated, "if you want a fulfilling life, you will always find it in work that serves people." This was why I made art and I had lost sight of how it could and should be applied to a career.

So I took myself apart. I decomposed why I was an artist into a career in software. The core motivations, the desire for impact, the foundational intentions. Shortly after, I founded my agency, and for nearly a decade we bootstrapped nonprofits and NGOs. It was a way I could use the power of technology to add value in the world at scale. I’ve been at it ever since.

Ultimately what carried over philosophically was a triangle. The artist, the work, and the viewer. In software it’s the business, the builder and the user. The relationship between them is the functional frame for software as much as fine art. The quality of the work is the quality of the communication between those relationships.

Shared context means aligned communication. Aligned communication means shared understanding. Shared understanding is the potential for connection. Connection is the potential for compassion and empathy. Those are the potential for love. Bottom up or top down, it’s the same chain, and it’s present in all things business, art, relationships, life.

UX as a practice is the glue between the user the business and the technology by very definition. A good practitioner is well versed in all three. With AI systems in the mix, that’s cheaper, faster and more true than ever before. And still the quality of that relational triangle defines everything.

I’m a designer, an architect, a leader, a mentor and a business person. Now, in the AI era, I’m simply a builder. Properly setup AI tooling synthesizes everything I can do into output of a specific quality. Anyone who has depth in their technical knowledge can now produce viable prototypes and software of a quality high enough to test commercial applications by applying their past experience. The role now needs all of it and factually, I am all of it. I have architect-ed many complex platforms and I natively understand how to build a high functioning system. I arrived at agentic loops from first principles months before I saw anyone name them. But because I know what good looks like from years of mistakes and unexpected outcomes, with AI, I can produce whole systems in months rather than years. Time will tell if this is a good thing or not. But for now, we are all builders.