Next week, Cumberland Coast Studio is livestreaming the Norcross City Council special election debate. It’s my first livestream since 2013, when I captured Ed Roland of Collective Soul playing holiday songs in the studio. It’s a lot easier now.
This time my whole rig is an iPhone 18 Pro, a MacBook Air, a pair of Rode wireless mics, and Streamlabs into YouTube Studio. I expect to go from unpacking to broadcasting in a few minutes. A setup like this used to take hours of wiring, and weeks of planning.
My iPhone is doing work that used to require a dedicated DSLR camera, and my laptop no longer needs external encoding hardware. The new iPhone 18 Pro has a variable aperture on its main lens, and its autofocus tracking compares with mirrorless cameras. Top-of-the-line phones still have gaps for serious film work, but for a live session in a small room, they’re more than enough.
Lately, with AI’s help, almost everything I build or produce has felt too easy. New software and hardware don’t require me to learn the language first. Here are two more examples from the past month.
I connected one of my WordPress sites to Claude Cowork via MCP, a standard that allows AI to work directly inside other software. Now, I describe a new component or site-wide change in plain English, and it gets built and published. I don’t write a line of code.
My wife, Kristen, and I co-founded and run Norcross Porchfest, and we just announced the 2027 festival date, Saturday, May 1. Last year’s inaugural festival drew about 1,500 people to our hometown with 36 acts on 12 stages. To kick off 2027 planning, I described what we needed in plain English, and AI built it all in Airtable: linked databases for volunteers and homeowners, sign-up forms, and automated follow-ups.
It’s easier than ever to pick up professional-grade creative equipment, build a website, or manage specialized software. None of these activities needed a specialist, external vendor, or budget.
Last week on The Ezra Klein Show, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a prediction about what’s coming next in this environment. College takes 4 years, he said, so the first students who had these tools from day one are about 2 years from graduating.
“In 2 years’ time, you’re going to have a new generation of engineers and students and artists, and they’re going to be empowered. They’re going to be native to this in a way that’s going to give them an advantage.”
-Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO
He compared AI to a calculator, which was banned when he was in school and is now so ordinary nobody thinks about it.
The sudden advanced capabilities of these new generative AI systems arrived mid-career for me, with 20 years of habits to unlearn. Recent Stanford research shows employment of 22- to 25-year-old software developers running 19% below expected levels. Roughly one in five of the jobs you’d expect for those new graduates aren’t there today.
New AI tools can make it easy to get started, but they aren’t making it very easy to get hired.
I think Huang is on to something about the upcoming wave of innovation by AI-native graduates, and I expect a lot of it will arrive as companies they start themselves.
This was originally posted as the Feature in Lowered Barriers to Entry · The Catalog · №008, an issue of my weekly newsletter The Catalog. You can Subscribe for weekly insights.