I keep hearing the same fear from college students and recent grads: AI is taking our jobs. The entry-level work is disappearing. The ladder is being pulled up before we even get a foot on it.
I understand the fear. I just think it’s aimed at the wrong target.
Because here’s what I’ve watched happen in my own life over the past six months — not in theory, not in some think piece about the future of work. In actual projects, with actual clients, with actual money on the line.
What Six Months Actually Looked Like
I produced my first book. Every word of it is mine — my stories, my failures and life lessons. All of it is my content, but AI gave me something I didn’t have: a brilliant framework and structure to hang it all on, plus the support system behind AskMark, the tool that lets readers ask questions and get answers pulled straight from the book. Eight years ago, a first-time author building an interactive companion app for his book? That would have been fantasy.
I’ve built apps for Fortune 1000 clients that would have cost six to seven figures to produce the old way. Development teams, project managers, months of sprints. Now I deliver them with a fraction of the overhead — and the clients get better products faster.
That work is why Boondock Walker launched the Lab — an exploratory sandbox where we prototype the next thing for clients, sitting alongside our brand and demand capabilities. Applications that, until a year ago, would have taken a team of twenty and seven figures to build. Now a pair of us ships a working one in two weeks. Here’s why the model works: marketing shops can’t ship software. Engineering shops can’t do brand or demand. We’re both — and the combination compounds. The marketers know what to build because they sit in the funnel every day. The engineers actually build it. The feedback loop runs at the speed of one conversation, not three vendors and a Statement of Work.
The first Lab project we’re releasing as a product, not a client tool, is Vesper — the brand foundation app I first tried to create eight years ago. Back then, the programming costs alone would have run into the millions. It was impossible. Not hard — impossible. Vesper is an AI-guided brand strategy platform for founders and small business owners who aren’t ready for a full agency engagement — but are ready to build something that lasts. It takes what Boondock Walker does for clients and extends it to the people who need it most and could never afford it. I genuinely believe it has the potential to change how brand foundation and strategy get developed.
And I’ve launched multiple client websites using AI-assisted coding that cut development time dramatically, expanded what the sites can actually do, simplified the code underneath, and made the user experience better across the board.
None of that replaced me. All of it required me. My judgment, my taste, my twenty-plus years of knowing what a brand needs and what a client actually means when they say “make it pop.” AI didn’t do the thinking. It removed the tollbooths between my thinking and the finished thing.
The Question Behind the Fear
When someone says “AI is taking my job,” what they usually mean is: the job I was trained to expect is changing shape.
That’s true. It is. But here’s the part nobody puts on the graduation banner: the jobs were always changing shape. Ask anyone who learned paste-up layout right before desktop publishing arrived. Ask the developers who specialized in Flash. Every generation of workers has watched the ground shift under them.
The difference this time is which direction the door swings. Every previous wave of technology mostly helped the people who already had capital, teams, and infrastructure. This wave hands the tools to anyone with a laptop and the stubbornness to learn them. The million-dollar development team now fits in a browser tab. The barrier was never your talent. It was the cost of turning your talent into something real. That barrier just collapsed.
What This Means If You’re 23 and Worried
You have a choice in front of you, and it’s simpler than the headlines make it sound. You can look at AI negatively — as the thing that’s coming for you — or you can take full advantage of a capability this powerful. A capability that did not exist months ago. Not years. Months.
Nobody handed my generation anything like this at the start of our careers. If you’re just getting started in yours, stop and actually consider what that means. You’re standing at the beginning of your working life holding tools that the most well-funded companies on earth didn’t have when I started mine.
So stop asking “will AI take the job I was planning to apply for?” Start asking “what could I build now that was impossible for someone my age two years ago?”
The person who spends the next year mastering these tools — actually mastering them, not just typing prompts and hoping — is going to walk into rooms with capabilities that used to require a staff. You won’t be competing with AI. You’ll be competing with other people, same as always. The ones who treat AI as a threat will lose to the ones who treat it as a power tool.
I’m 50-something and I just had the most productive six months of my creative life. Not because I got smarter. Because the distance between my ideas and reality got shorter than it’s ever been.
That distance just got shorter for you too. The only question is what you’re going to build across it.
Your turn: What’s the one thing you’ve always wanted to build but wrote off as too expensive, too technical, or too far out of reach? Drop it in the comments. I’d genuinely like to know — because there’s a decent chance it’s not out of reach anymore.
From the Book
From Chapter 6, “Build Your Own”:
Let me be specific about this: you have unfair advantages that previous generations didn’t have.
AI will write your marketing copy, create your images, help you think through strategy, even write code if you need it. Claude, ChatGPT, Midjourney, GitHub Copilot — these aren’t replacing human creativity. They’re amplifiers. What used to take weeks now takes hours.
This is the greatest opportunity in human history to build something from nothing. The barriers that existed even ten years ago have been demolished by technology. The only question is whether you’ll take advantage of it.
Brave & Boundless: 15 Rules for Breaking the Cycle and Building What’s Next — coming soon.