Think Bigger

I have about 4 months of runway left before I MUST find a job, as I'll have almost run out of money.

I'm trying to figure out what I want to do next. I'll not lie—I feel a little lost. I kind of know the direction I want to go in based on what sparks my curiosity and fascination: World Models & Spatial Intelligence (WMSI), but I don't actually have the hard skills required to make it yet.

My worry, as I've outlined many times in other posts, is that web development is going to be eaten up in the next 6-18 months by AI. Non-technical coders will be able to build web applications on par with senior developers. I'm certain that this is guaranteed within this timeframe. At the very least, an entire web development team will be boiled down to two people: a designer and a systems architect—one to design the aesthetics of the app and one to command a workforce of AI agents to develop it.

Claude Code is a better web developer than me, is getting better every month, and is only going to continue getting better. I don't see the appeal whatsoever in being a prompt monkey or glorified button pusher. Yes, I can "command" the vision of app creation like some product manager, BUT so (soon) can everyone else. I'm not convinced there is any value in this long term. Short-term yes, maybe 1-2 years, but long term no. So that begs the question of what to do about it. Clearly I can't stay in this domain long term. I want a highly valued, highly paid job where I actually have to use my brain. I can feel myself getting dumber every day using Claude Code. It's so good for web development I only need to think high level.

I've come across multiple people recently that just got me pumped to be alive—people who have a life's mission or clearly REALLY enjoy what they are doing. I FUCKING love this. It makes me realise that if I work hard I can be like them, working on a mission to make something great for the world. I just want a purpose, a mission. Harvey Hobb is one. A two-time SaaS founder who wanted to work on something with more meaning and purpose, something genuinely beneficial for society: synthetic fuels via carbon capture. Hell yes. Another is Vinay Hiremath, one of the founders of Loom who is a multi-£100 millionaire who, despite all the money and fame, felt empty and depressed—another perfect example that money can't buy happiness. As a man you need a mission, you need something you are working towards, even better if it's a positive contribution to humanity and not something playing off human vice. Notable other mentions are Adam Majmudar, who spent 6-12 months doing deep dives on lots of topics like robotics, energy and AI, to see what he wanted to make his next pursuit. And today I came across Joseph Suarez doing really cool things in RL. I love finding these people. People who are masters of their craft, have a pursuit and are going ALL IN. I LOVE IT.

At the moment I'm just trying to consume as much information as possible about everything to see what interests me and also finish my dissertation on creating Langchats (AI-enhanced language learning platform).

I have to accept that I have to earn money to survive and I only have 4 months left. So if I have to go back into web development part-time in order to support myself I will do so, but web development is not the end game. It's not that web development isn't enough from a creative or purpose standpoint—as I've talked about here, I think it could be, there can be beauty, creativity and mastery in everything—my concern is that it will simply no longer be economically valuable. Gone are the days of the Full-Stack SWE earning over £100k/year, doing low stress work and able to live a very comfortable life. I just don't think this is the reality in 1-2 years.

When I think about what excites me, what fires me up, it's WMSI. This is what I was meant to do, in some capacity. This is my calling. I don't think my contribution to web development is totally over though, just maybe in the traditional full stack web application sense, but there is still much to build on the web as a medium. I've recently been introduced to sparkjs, which has come out of World Labs, Fei-Fei Li's Spatial Intelligence company building Large World Models. They clearly have a vision for these LWMs to be used and interacted with on the web, so maybe this is something I could work on. Something in this space, crossing my interest in WMSI with web development.

A thought I had today was like Adam Majmudar's Deep Dive on Deep Learning—I'll do my own deep dive specifically on WMSI, and then potentially contribute to sparkjs as I think it is open source. This way I can learn about how these technologies are being implemented on the web. Just the kernel of a thought, but I'll see where it goes.

So current plan is:

Finish Langchats development and dissertation write-up in next 2 weeks
Do more research on things that spark my interest
At the moment though this might be a deep dive on WMSI and how we render WMs on the web