The game has changed.A few years ago, if I had an idea for a small tool or a workflow improvement, it usually stayed in my head. Not because the idea was bad, but because I didn’t have the technical skills to build it... Read more
The game has changed.
A few years ago, if I had an idea for a small tool or a workflow improvement, it usually stayed in my head. Not because the idea was bad, but because I didn’t have the technical skills to build it myself.
Now that gap is much smaller.
In 2025 alone, I built several small tools for my own work with the help of AI. These were things I had been thinking about for years, but never acted on because they would have required a developer, extra time, or simply too much effort for what seemed like a small problem.
The important skill is no longer just execution. More and more, it is the ability to describe the problem clearly and know what result you want.
A simple example from post-production: on one project, we had to export scenes every day and burn in the current date. It only took a few minutes to update it manually, but it still required attention every single day. So I used AI to help me build a small tool that updates it automatically. It is not revolutionary software. It just removes one repetitive task from the project. But that is exactly why it matters.
To me, this is where AI is most useful. Not as a replacement for judgement, but as a way to free up mental space and automate routine.
But there is another side to it. If I can turn an idea into something real in a few days, someone else can do the same after simply seeing it. That changes the value of execution and increases the value of ideas, taste, clarity of thought, and the ability to ask the right questions.
And this is not the first shift like this. When photography appeared, people thought painting would disappear. When cinema appeared, people predicted the end of theatre. When synthesizers arrived, many feared live music would become unnecessary. None of that happened. But each of those moments changed the balance. They changed what became rare and what became valuable.
I think AI is doing something similar now.
It does not destroy creative work. But it does change what sits at the centre of that work.
Editing still feels relatively safe compared to some other fields, at least for now. It is still emotional, instinctive, and difficult to reduce to a clean technical brief. But two years ago, most of us also did not expect AI to become this useful at writing code, processing information, generating images, or helping build tools that actually work.
So I keep coming back to the same thought: the game has changed. And we are probably only at the beginning of that change.
A few years ago, if I had an idea for a small tool or a workflow improvement, it usually stayed in my head. Not because the idea was bad, but because I didn’t have the technical skills to build it myself.
Now that gap is much smaller.
In 2025 alone, I built several small tools for my own work with the help of AI. These were things I had been thinking about for years, but never acted on because they would have required a developer, extra time, or simply too much effort for what seemed like a small problem.
The important skill is no longer just execution. More and more, it is the ability to describe the problem clearly and know what result you want.
A simple example from post-production: on one project, we had to export scenes every day and burn in the current date. It only took a few minutes to update it manually, but it still required attention every single day. So I used AI to help me build a small tool that updates it automatically. It is not revolutionary software. It just removes one repetitive task from the project. But that is exactly why it matters.
To me, this is where AI is most useful. Not as a replacement for judgement, but as a way to free up mental space and automate routine.
But there is another side to it. If I can turn an idea into something real in a few days, someone else can do the same after simply seeing it. That changes the value of execution and increases the value of ideas, taste, clarity of thought, and the ability to ask the right questions.
And this is not the first shift like this. When photography appeared, people thought painting would disappear. When cinema appeared, people predicted the end of theatre. When synthesizers arrived, many feared live music would become unnecessary. None of that happened. But each of those moments changed the balance. They changed what became rare and what became valuable.
I think AI is doing something similar now.
It does not destroy creative work. But it does change what sits at the centre of that work.
Editing still feels relatively safe compared to some other fields, at least for now. It is still emotional, instinctive, and difficult to reduce to a clean technical brief. But two years ago, most of us also did not expect AI to become this useful at writing code, processing information, generating images, or helping build tools that actually work.
So I keep coming back to the same thought: the game has changed. And we are probably only at the beginning of that change.
