We're Living Through a 70-Year Gap

In 1772, Joseph Priestley synthesized nitrous oxide. Scientists spent the next several decades using it recreationally—"laughing gas parties" were popular entertainment among the educated classes.

It wasn't until 1844 that Horace Wells, a dentist, watched a man injure himself while high on nitrous oxide and noticed he felt no pain. Wells performed the first painless dental extraction shortly after.

Seventy years. For seventy years, the solution to one of humanity's most persistent problems—the agony of surgery—existed. People just hadn't connected the dots.

I think about this a lot because I suspect we're living through something similar right now.

The Overhang

There's a concept in technology sometimes called "technological overhang"—the gap between what's technically possible and what's actually being done. Usually this gap is small. Someone invents something, it gets commercialized, people use it. The cycle takes a few years at most.

But occasionally, the gap is enormous. And I believe we're in one of those moments.

Things that were genuinely impossible two years ago are now not just possible but almost trivial. Problems that required teams and months can now be solved in afternoons. Entire categories of software that were economically unviable are now within reach of individuals.

Most people—including most technical people—don't fully grasp this yet. Not because they're slow, but because the change happened so fast that our intuitions haven't caught up.

Why I'm Writing This

I'm a developer. I've been writing code professionally for six years, long enough to have strong intuitions about what's hard and what's easy, what's possible and what isn't.

Those intuitions are now wrong. Frequently.

I keep having the experience of assuming something will take weeks, then discovering it takes hours. Of dismissing an idea as impractical, then realizing the constraints I was assuming no longer exist.

This is disorienting. It's also exhilarating.

I started this site because I wanted a place to explore this publicly. To write about what I'm discovering. To build small experiments and share what works. To think out loud about what this moment actually means.

Some of what I write might be useful to you. Some of it might be wrong. A lot of it is just me trying to figure out what's real.

What I'm Not Doing

I'm not here to sell you on AI hype. I'm skeptical of most breathless predictions and think a lot of the discourse is noise.

I'm also not primarily here to sell consulting services—though yes, I do that work and I'm good at it. If you're trying to figure out what's newly possible for your specific situation, we should talk.

But mostly I'm here because this is genuinely interesting and I'm lucky enough to have the technical background to explore it. I live in a wealthy country, I have the skills to build things, and I have the time to think about this.

That feels like a responsibility, honestly. Not in a grandiose way—I'm just one person writing on the internet. But if there's a chance to help close the gap, even a little, between what's possible and what people are actually doing? That seems worth trying.

Where to Start

If this resonates, here's what I'd suggest:

• Read my latest posts — I publish when I find something genuinely interesting
• See what I'm building — Small experiments, tools, and prototypes
• Subscribe — I'll email you occasionally when there's something worth sharing

And if you want to talk—about ideas, about working together, about anything—I'm reachable.