I’ve been working with AI tools for about a year. Then something changed in December 2025 when I, and the rest of the world, discovered Claude Code and Opus 4.5. Not just generating snippets or asking questions—actually building, with an agent that reads my codebase, runs commands, and ships changes. It’s transformed how I work and what I believe is possible.

It’s also clarified something important: AI can raise your ceiling, but only you can raise your floor. And the distance between them can only stretch so far.

The ceiling is what’s possible—the upper bound of what you can produce. AI lifts that dramatically. Work that once required teams or years of specialized knowledge is now within reach of anyone willing to build.

The floor is something else. The floor is your foundation: your taste, your judgment, your understanding of why things work. AI can’t build that for you. It comes from doing the work, from making decisions and living with their consequences.

Here’s the thing the doomers miss, and the naive optimists too: the ceiling is tethered to the floor. You can’t stretch them infinitely apart. Without understanding, you can’t direct the work. You can’t debug it. You can’t even tell if it’s good. Your ceiling is only as high as your floor allows it to be.

But this is exactly why the moment is so exciting. Building is how you learn—and AI lets you build at the scale of your ambition. The gap between what you can imagine and what you can execute has never been smaller. You can see your ideas working, failing, revealing their flaws in practice rather than theory. You iterate faster. Your judgment sharpens.

My ambitions are greater than they’ve ever been. Not because AI does the thinking for me, but because I can finally attempt things that match the scope of what I want to make. And in the attempting, the building, the failing and fixing—my floor rises. Which means the ceiling can rise further still.

They climb together. That’s the trick, and the gift.