The Window is Open

In the last six months, a lot of smart people have been arguing loudly about whether AI will take their jobs. I understand the anxiety. I've watched industries reshape themselves in real time before. I was in the games industry when the web and then mobile showed up. When free-to-play rewrote the economics (and killed my consulting business), when Unity made what (literally) used to be $500K tools essentially free overnight. I've experienced a structural shift before.

Here's what I think is actually happening: the wrong people are panicking, and the wrong people are staying calm.

Two things happened recently, and they're easier to see clearly if you look at them together.

The first: AI tools crossed a meaningful threshold. Not the hype threshold. The useful threshold. The point where you stop wondering if they're worth the trouble and start organizing your work around them because it's obviously better. For builders specifically, the drag is gone. The "everything else", e.g., copy, documentation, onboarding flows, error messages, landing page copy, etc, no longer require a second person or a month of weekends. One person with taste and a clear problem to solve can now ship things that used to take a small team.

If Andre Karpathy (let’s not even get into how much better of a coder he is than me) can say, “I don’t think I’ve typed a ling of code since December.”, then you know something has fundamentally shifted.

The second: the labor market for knowledge workers just got structurally weird in a way that isn't going back. Job postings for AI-adjacent roles are outpacing qualified candidates at roughly 3:1. Average time to fill those roles: 142 days. That's not a skills gap. That's a moat-sized opportunity for anyone willing to have actual demonstrated skills, not just familiarity with the tools.

The credentials problem

Here's the part that doesn't get said directly enough: most people responding to this moment are doing it wrong.

They're taking courses. Getting certifications. Learning about AI. Building "familiarity." These are all fine in the abstract but they don't produce the thing that actually matters: proof that you can build something real with these tools.

The employers and clients who are struggling to hire right now aren't struggling because there aren't enough people who've taken an AI course. They're struggling because there aren't enough people who have sat down, used these tools on an actual problem, shipped something, and can show the work.

That gap, between people who know about AI and people who build things with it, is where all the interesting opportunities live right now.

What this newsletter is about

BUW has always been about focused, vertical tools that solve a specific pain point for their users. And now, more than ever, the tools that matter are the ones where you can look at what you made and say: that thing solved a real problem, it works, and someone found it useful.

That's the lens. Boring beats clever. Shipped beats perfect. Proof beats credentials.

The next twelve issues are a methodical walk through the whole journey, from finding opportunities hiding in plain sight, to building the smallest thing that works, to charging for it before you're ready, to systematizing so you can keep going. Totally unglamorous. But boringly specific and practical.

If you've been waiting for a reason to start moving, this is the moment. The window is open. The question is whether you're going to watch other people climb through it or go first.

Let's build something.

- Karlo

Boring Utility Weekly

What's next:

Issue 0001 is "The LLM Unlock" - a specific, honest look at what the last six weeks of AI tooling actually changed for solo builders, with examples you can use immediately.

One question for you:

Quick poll (hit reply and send your answer): What's the biggest thing keeping you from shipping your next idea right now?

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