My great-grandfather was a builder.
All he had to his name was a small sack of hand tools, gifted to him by his own father. They were old and worn, and he sharpened them each morning before work, at the crack of dawn — sitting beside a small open fire on the building site, boiling water for tea. I still have a few of those hand tools in my garage. Timeless, indestructible. Probably forged by hand.
Every second Sunday, he would set off before first light, walk 20 miles to the neighbouring village, just to have Sunday lunch with Lily and her family. Then walk 20 miles back that night, to where he was working.
He slept onsite.
Lily would later become his wife, my great-grandmother. And eventually, together, they saved enough money to start a life and a business.
On the weekends they would go into the forest and cut down trees. The trees were dragged by horses back to a sawmill — his own building on the edge of a river, the flowing water turning a huge flywheel, turning the giant saw blades.
He turned trees into lumber, into house frames, into homes.
Time moves fast. It’s only been a few generations since then, and we still remember enough to tell the stories again and again, sitting around the dinner table at our own Sunday lunches.
Yet the pace of change stops for nobody.
I, for one, welcome our shiny new overlords
I was talking to my brother the other day. “Wow, have you seen those robots in China doing kung fu? Last year they couldn’t even climb stairs. Now they’ll kick your arse, AND take names…”
My brother’s a builder too. Award-winning luxury homes. It runs in the family.
We were talking about the trouble he has finding anyone to do the work. Gen Zers these days aren’t interested in learning a trade.
I was saying, “In a couple of years, instead of kicking your arse (or, to be more correct, as well as kicking your arse) there will be robots that can build a house … 24/7. You’ll just give them the designs, and off they go. They’ll be putting up the house frames in one day, and then while you sleep that night, the roof will go on. Same robot, many skills — you won’t even need to teach them, it’s all just software.”
Very soon now, there won’t be any such thing as a sparkie, chippie or dunny-diver. Just robots and code (and more robots). And maybe a supervisor to stop them from “kicking yer arse”.
Resistance is futile.
We have a housing crisis here in Australia. Heaps of land, heaps of people — massive immigration, and we need 240,000 new homes a year just to keep up.
Robots can help us.
From trees to pre-fab
I started programming in the ’80s. PEEK and POKE on the Commodore 64, from BASIC code printed in game magazines.
I feel like I’ve watched the same evolution my family did, from my great-grandfather to my brother. From hand-crafting houses out of trees to our modern pre-fab homes.
I even remember before the internet. My first job was coding client/server applications on a Unix system. No mention of HTML or port 80 anywhere to be found.
And then Netscape arrived. In the beginning we hand-crafted everything. HTML tables!!! 1px GIFs. <blink> tags. Visitor counters. Animated “Under Construction” GIFs with a little man digging. “Best viewed in Netscape Navigator at 800×600.” Man, if you don’t remember those days, they were glorious. I’m still partying like it’s ’99.
To continue the analogy, those were the days when we had to cut the trees down ourselves. Every. Single. Time. But the results were beautiful. We had 216 web-safe colours to work with!
- Then we entered the pre-fab era. We didn’t need to chop trees down anymore — someone had done that for us. Those guys were called Bootstrap and Foundation.
- Then the whole house arrived on a truck. Click a few buttons and there it was. We still had to assemble it, but it was getting a lot faster now. Wix and Squarespace.
- Then came the power tools. Unplugged, battery-powered. We just had to remember to put them on charge each night. Copilot.
And now the robots are here.
I type a prompt into Claude, and voilà! House fully constructed. All I need to do is move in. Actually, forget it, man — the robots can carry my furniture in too. I have no idea what I’m going to get, but that’s the whole excitement of it! Christmas every day.
These are the best of times.
The moat is gone
I’m a little nostalgic about the good ol’ days. The PEEKs and the POKEs, HTML you could write by hand and immediately see the results. But at the same time…
…wow. I am so productive. My brain has exploded with ideas. A new app, a new website, every day.
The moat is gone. I’m no longer a technical specialist. Everyone can do it. I’m no longer some arcane coding wizard hiding in the basement like a medieval priest guarding the sacred texts.
But that’s my advantage. Ideas are the new economy.
And I’ve got 50 years of them ready to go. See ya on the App Store.
A less-crappy VPN.
My first project: I got sick of paying for a crappy VPN every month, so I built my own. It’s somewhat ironic that I’m now asking you to pay for it too. So if you can’t be bothered typing your own Claude Code prompt, go ahead and give this little rabbit a run for its money.
If you don’t enjoy crafting software as much as I do, and would prefer I type in the prompts for you — I’ve developed an excellent rapport with the Claude robots. They’ve even adopted my (excellent) coding style. Claude now refers to me as “Sir Dude”, the original architect:
Contact me at rescue@agent33.com, and I’ll help you build your dreams too.