where the on switch is
On the gap between people deep in AI and people still looking for the on switch, and why I'm going to keep writing for both.
Yesterday I caught up with a friend who’s a sports performance coach. He’s not technical, but he’s starting to see the writing on the wall: AI is in his future, and he’s been reluctant to jump in.
He started hitting me with the foundational questions:
What’s the difference between Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini? How do I even get started? Which one should I use?
His company uses Microsoft Copilot, so I suggested starting there — accessible, free for him. That conversation stuck with me.
In my technical bubble I see people talking about spec-driven development, RAG pipelines, model benchmarks. For a huge part of the world, people are still just trying to figure out where the on switch is.
That conversation is why I posted the PB&J story the night before. Some of my friends are deep in the code. Plenty of them are just looking for the how-to to get through their day a little more effectively. What seems like a basic step to one of us is exactly the knife someone else is missing.
I’m going to keep writing for both sides — the people building agent systems and the people still trying to figure out which model to open first.