One of the common criticisms I hear about AI for coding is that the tools are good for hobbyists, but they aren’t up to the task of real commercial work in high-stakes situations.

While I agree with the sentiment behind those statements, if we look at the real world today, we see something very different:

Boris Cherny, responsible for actually creating Claude Code within Anthropic, said in a recent video:

“It’s writing almost all [of the internal code at Anthropic]… for me personally it’s been writing 100% of my code for at least 6 months. The work of engineering has just completely changed. I feel like I suddenly have superpowers… engineering has never been this fun.”

At Spotify, one of the world’s most beloved apps, their own internal report says that “Today, more than 99% of our engineers use AI coding tools every week, 94% report that AI has made them more productive, and we’re seeing a 76% increase in pull request frequency, with the vast majority of PRs authored by a developer working alongside an AI agent.”

And on a personal level, in addition to being amazed daily at what I can code with these tools, having made dozens of personal apps and two major apps that power my entire business and team of 10+, I also see that the engineers whom I respect the most in this world, including one who literally wrote dozens of books on how to code over the last 30 years, now don’t write so much as a line of code by hand anymore. And yet their genius isn’t diminished but enhanced.

It’s clear to me that these tools are not just novelties and gimmicks used to create AI slop (although there is plenty of that going around), but in the right hands, they are literal magic for seasoned developers everywhere.

If you’re a business owner wondering how/where to use these tools in your own operations, my suggestion is to stop doomscrolling and listening to what these tools can’t do, and start looking at the extremely talented people who know how to code legitimately, and study what they’re doing.

…what you think of as your greatest “superpower” will shortly become your biggest weakness.

It’s not just your secret weapon, it’s everyone else’s, too.

I’ve used teleprompters for years; it's how I get all the garbage in my head onto the screen.

I built my own teleprompter as part of my personal content creation app about a year ago, but it always moved at a fixed speed, which doesn’t allow for the pacing changes that are so important for delivering a good speech. I dreamed of having some union bearded guy with a gut just off camera moving my teleprompter forward as I talked, like all the great late-night talk show hosts.

But last week, I made my teleprompter vastly more useful by adding two new features:

1. I made it mobile first. So the same place I write down my content ideas and store them (my giant content creator app, which I’ll reveal to you shortly) is the same place any script I’ve ever written can instantly go to teleprompter.

2. My teleprompter now listens to me with my phone’s built-in microphone and scrolls at exactly my pace — and if I skip a paragraph, it finds me again, even from 15 feet away.

The teleprompter follows the speaker's voice using speech recognition and fuzzy text matching, with mobile-friendly controls.

This means that for the first time ever, I can take my scripts out of the studio, performing my content in places like this without having to lug around my big main camera or studio teleprompter screen.

I just put my phone on its own stand next to my camera, and voilà.

It’s one of the thousands of features of my all-in-one content creator mega app, a project so diabolical it can’t be contained in one post.

You can’t fake a good story.

Socrates said, "Be as you wish to seem." As a business or a professional, you shouldn’t sell your customers or your employees on a story that isn’t true.

Case in point: the documentary The Queen of Versailles profoundly changed my life. It made me realize deeply that more showy wealth just means more stuff. More garbage. More headaches.

But there’s another part of that movie that no one remembers: the part that shows how they made their money… the sales floor in Vegas where they amped up their sales staff to go out and aggressively convince people to buy time shares.

The boss’s son tells all the staff—with a straight face, no less!—that what they are doing is saving lives by selling time shares. That their work is as noble as that of doctors, firefighters, nurses, etc.

Give me a break.

Of course, the tactic looks like it worked in the movie, and they did do hundreds of millions of dollars in sales on this premise. But would any intelligent person believe that story?

That selling time shares is saving lives?

When a quick Google search reveals countless people for whom their timeshare is a crushing, ever-increasing burden that they can’t get rid of, even in death?

Now obviously your team will be more loyal to you if they believe they are “saving lives” vs. “selling people expensive crap they don’t need and can’t afford".

But for a good business story to REALLY be a good story?

It has to also be true.

You’ve seen what AI can do with video, and likely been very impressed by it.

But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect…

At aloa.agency, we’ve gotten wildly better results by combining real, technical 3D modeling with AI video.

Instead of asking AI to make information up based on a few photographs, we built a custom software tool to input real 3D models that our expert 3D designer created by hand.

The upshot is that we can get a result that is more technically accurate while still having all the creative freedom that AI workflows allow.

Nothing is better than merging old-school craftsmanship with cutting-edge tools!