June 11, 2026

Have you bought a car lately?

Single people can be as productive as whole teams.

People are freaking out. There’s so much angst about how their jobs are changing with AI. I get it. It does feel like the things you used to do aren’t as valuable anymore. There’s new things to learn. And the new things keep changing fast. Every day there’s a new tool, or a tool you got used to last week that doesn’t exist anymore or got swallowed into some other company’s features.

And there’s a lot of concern about employment in general, if all of a sudden a whole team can be squashed into one person with an AI.

The funny thing about that quote up top? More on that in a minute.

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I remember my first job at Accenture, 20+ years ago.

Work was crazy. The CEO had just quit to join a billion dollar unicorn. And I remember all the learning I had to do to keep up. I’d go to Borders to buy book after book on Java and Linux. There were 15 new distributions of Linux every week and the Java versions just ticking up and up. To relax, my wife and I would order a movie and snacks from Kozmo.com on a Friday night, placing the order over the wireless internet I’d just put in. I was the first person I knew to install it. I was also doing a ton of driving by then. We needed a new car, and shopping for one was awful. Wired had me reassured it would be fixed soon:

Car salespeople will be rendered obsolete. Wired

But thinking back. Borders was the grim reaper. Tom Hanks played the CEO killing the little bookstores run by the likes of Meg Ryan. Then Borders itself disappeared, killed by Amazon. But hold on, now Barnes and Noble is having a resurgence. I’m surprised we haven’t gotten You’ve Got Mail 2, where Meg Ryan’s little bookstore is back and thriving too.

That wireless system in my apartment? I threw it out less than a year later. It was a proprietary protocol that didn’t survive the fight with Wifi.

Linux stayed. Most of the distributions died.

That CEO of Accenture and his new online grocery store, Webvan? Bankrupt in five years. It was obvious to some people:

One of the fundamental mistakes that everybody made is the assumption that everyone would flock to online. Wired

Of course. And now we get all our groceries online from Instacart. Kozmo became a laughing stock, and here I am buying snacks for delivery in 30 minutes on Uber Eats and GoPuff.

And have you bought a car lately?

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The past was weird. None of it landed where the confident people said it would.

Now, some things do die for good. Nobody’s bringing back the job of lighting street lamps, and maybe a few of the things AI takes don’t come back either. I’m not going to pretend that part away. But the wholesale “everything is different now and your skills are worthless” story has been told in 96, 99, 05, 08, and every stretch since, and it has never once been as total as it felt in the moment.

Things swing. They overshoot, snap back, and settle somewhere nobody guessed.

Not great news if you hate rollercoasters. Not terrible news either :)

That quote up top. It’s from 2005. It’s about Ruby on Rails. Written on Slashdot by Tobias Lütke, who went on to found Shopify. They still have teams of software engineers.

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