My nephew and niece came over on a rainy day last week. The kids were playing, and I was at the table working — building in Claude Code, deep in it. At some point my nephew stopped mid-game, looked over at me, and asked the question kids always ask and adults have learned not to:
“What are you working on?”
And instead of telling him, I showed him.
I sat him down in front of the screen and gave him the thirty-second version of what this thing is. Then I asked him:
“You want to be in the comic?”
“Yeah.”
I took his photo. A few minutes later he was looking at himself as a character — panels, ink, the whole thing. He lit up in that way you can’t fake and can’t buy. Then the rest of the kids came running. I want to be in the comic. Me next. A rainy afternoon turned into a comic studio, and I was just the guy at the table taking commissions.
I’ve been carrying that afternoon around all week, because of what’s been arriving in my inbox.
After the first letter went out, I asked people to hit reply, and they did. Real notes, long ones, from people I know and people I’ve never met. And almost all of them had the same shape: darkness first, then a small door. Worry about what AI means for their work, their kids, their craft — and then, almost apologetically, but thank you for the optimism.
The conversations that grew out of those replies were some of the best I’ve had all year — all of them, one way or another, about creativity and the machine. What happens to the work. What happens to the people who make the work. Whether the thing that made us feel most like ourselves is about to be done faster and cheaper by something that never gets tired.
Midweek I took the question to Instagram. I put up a story and ran a poll — one blunt question: are you optimistic about AI? A hundred and twenty-eight people watched it. Here’s where the votes landed:
The votes told one story. The messages and emails that followed told a better one — longer, more personal, and nowhere near as tidy as a yes or a no.
I want to be honest about where I land, because it would be easy to wave this away and easier to join it. I’m concerned — small c. I’ve read enough to know how strange this could get, and I don’t think the people building this technology should be trusted on faith. I’m glad people are watching, and I want them to keep watching.
But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: we are not walking into this blind. We’ve been rehearsing it for over a century. Since H.G. Wells, science fiction has been running the scenarios for us — the machines that serve us, replace us, outgrow us, love us. Seventy-plus years of modern sci-fi is basically a civilization doing scenario planning out loud. The darkness in my inbox isn’t ignorance. It’s the opposite. We’ve imagined this so thoroughly that the fear arrives pre-installed.
The other half doesn’t arrive pre-installed. The other half you have to collect yourself, one small moment at a time. The rainy afternoon was one of mine.
That’s the part I can’t square with the darkness. For most of my life I’ve had visions I couldn’t execute alone — websites I wanted to build, illustrations I could see but not draw, whole designs living in my head with no way out. Getting them into the world meant assembling a team every time, and mostly they stayed in my head. I’m not against hiring people — I build teams for a living and I want a world full of paid, working creative people. But there is something I refuse to apologize for: for the first time, when the vision shows up, I can just start.
And the kids — they don’t have the bottleneck and they don’t have the dread. They just have the blank page, and for them it’s still an invitation. Somewhere along the way, for us, it became a verdict. We got older, the critic got louder, and the fun started needing a permission slip.
I don’t have an answer for the people who wrote to me — not one that fits in a letter, anyway. What I have is a rainy afternoon, a comic starring a nine-year-old, and a houseful of kids who think the blank page is the best part. And I can say my own part plainly: I’m extremely optimistic. I have never been more excited to create — in my work and out of it — than I am right now. So this is where I’ve landed: I’m going to keep the watch, and I’m going to keep the wonder. On the evidence of this week, they fit at the same table.
— Joe
