[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 489 entitled, rethinking WordPress, open source, SaaS and AI for 2027. It was published on Thursday, the 12th of November, 2026.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before I am joined by Aaron, Aaron. Aaron, you'll find out in a few moments to talk about the topics I just mentioned, a few bits of housekeeping.
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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Aaron Reimann. He's been on the podcast before, but today we get into the whole, what's 2027 going to look like. Aaron has, like many of you, been playing with AI and trying to reconfigure what his agency looks like, which CMS to use, how to make sure that he's profitable and noticeable in the landscape in the year to come.
I'm sure this is going to resonate with a lot of people. I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Aaron Reimann. Hello, Aaron.
[00:03:25] Aaron Reimann: Hello, Nathan. How are you doing?
[00:03:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. I never know if it's Aaron or Aaron.
[00:03:29] Aaron Reimann: I don't know if I understood the difference of what you said, so.
[00:03:32] Nathan Wrigley: That's great. An.
[00:03:34] Aaron Reimann: It, it's better than Arun, so just don't say Arun and I'll, be happy.
[00:03:39] Nathan Wrigley: I've got the two possible correct answers, so we'll go with Aaron. 'cause that's how it comes out of my mouth. It's very nice to have you. Aaron and I got into a chat yesterday on X. We knew that we were doing this podcast episode and Aaron was sharing a bunch of stuff that he's been doing with AI and so that probably will be the, the focus of what we're gonna talk about today. I know it's a banal question, and so hopefully you'll forgive me for it though. Aaron, can you just introduce yourself quickly so that everybody has an understanding of where you sit in the WordPress space?
[00:04:10] Aaron Reimann: Yeah, no problem. So I've been doing web development for 30 years. I've got a lot of grey hair because of it. but, started doing, PHP in like 2000, found WordPress in 2005. I didn't really like WordPress, to be honest at that point, because it's, it wasn't great. give it a few years.
Once we had custom post types and stuff like that, 2008 or so, I was like, okay, I, had my own little CMS. but WordPress clearly surpassed that, around 2008 or so. And so been doing a lot of WordPress stuff for the past, what, 18, 20 years or so, and I run, an agency called Clockwork Web Dev.
[00:04:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Alright, well that's great. So we know that you've been in the web dev space, you've got an agency and you've been working for many, many years. things I guess, are in a state of flocks and although I don't wish you to share anything that you don't wish to share, I know that you've got a little bit of a story about how the rollercoaster of agency life has been since the, the dawn of ai, you know, the sort of mainstream chat, GP two chat, two and beyond.
Do you just wanna briefly share how it's gone for you and the agency? Again, only sharing the bits that you're comfortable
[00:05:25] Aaron Reimann: Yeah. Yeah. So I started Clockwork in 2019. I had sold my other agency sideways eight, and, we started off really, small. It was just me. and then around 2000 and, was it 23 or so? My business was growing from between 23 and 24. Our, revenue, we had a revenue increase of about 83%.
[00:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:05:57] Aaron Reimann: and we hired, yeah, we, it with, that meant we had to hire a lot of people too. because we were just, we had a tonne of work. and I was, we were projecting, 2024, wow, 2020 five's gonna be great. and then 2025 rolled around and you have a new president, which that's, that gives you some uncertainty.
But then you also had a president that decides to, mess with all the tariffs. and then it felt like around like May or, I dunno, April, may or so, AI became a, we were all talking about ai, before then, but, it wasn't, it wasn't that usable. to, be, honest.
[00:06:48] Nathan Wrigley: No, it was making images and having a bit of a giggle around the edges, wasn't it? Nothing
[00:06:53] Aaron Reimann: Correct. Yeah, it,
[00:06:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:06:55] Aaron Reimann: but by the end of 2025, in 2025, I tried to use a cursor to, to write a WordPress plugin and it couldn't write it. Wrote the plugin in the wrong directory. I went in and I said, I,
[00:07:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:07:12] Aaron Reimann: I said, where's, it said, I'm done, the plugin's there. And I'm like, I don't see the plugin.
And so I went into the, files and I was like, oh, you put it in the wrong directory. That's not a problem anymore. AI has clearly surpassed, those stupid problems. And I think AI really around November, December of 2025 is where I started building stuff where I'm like, okay, this is better than what I used to be able to write.
and that started changing everything.
[00:07:48] Nathan Wrigley: And so how did it, how did it work out with your clients? Did you, did you sort of maintain, you know, revenue or did 2025 turn out to be a
[00:07:56] Aaron Reimann: 2025 was a little, a dip probably. I, don't have the numbers in my head, but it felt, like about 10, 10% decreased. but which, makes sense. And we also downsized. because we, of the uncertainty we had to get rid of some contractors and some employees, which nobody likes doing.
but so we, went from 15 people, now we're eight.
[00:08:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Wow. Yeah.
[00:08:27] Aaron Reimann: 20, 26, January 20, 26, I was like, I really nervous. and we've had to really pivot our business to, to build things, in a, different way, in a more efficient way. and that's, what I've done and I'm my in, within my business right now.
I'm mostly just building tools that make my team more productive or things that are fun, which is I've, I wasn't there. I've never been in a business where I'm just building tools that, that make me more efficient.
[00:09:08] Nathan Wrigley: Right. And, and has that, has that pessimism, that's probably the wrong word. 'cause you certainly don't sound pessimistic in, in the way that you described that. But has that, 2026 and I guess looking forward into 2027, have things flipped? Have they become much more like 2024 again, or have
[00:09:24] Aaron Reimann: I.
[00:09:25] Nathan Wrigley: to trouble you?
[00:09:27] Aaron Reimann: Yeah, I, it's, there's still a major level of uncertainty. it because, every week there's a new, there's a new tool, there's a new thing, there's a, there's art craft that will, that replaces Photoshop and Illustrator and all that stuff. And it's all open source. It's like, it, seems like a lot of things are collapsing when it comes to software in general.
And I keep saying software is dead. because software is not what it used to be. and I'm glad I'm not in the, SaaS, business because I think everybody is just rebuilding the tool that is specific to their needs, and their cancelling, their subscription to the, SaaS stuff.
And so 2027, I think is gonna be really, rough for those SaaS people. for us as an agency, it very well could be very un, it's gonna be uncertain, but we've pivoted a little bit. We're offering, we were doing 99% WordPress, but now we're doing, astrocytes because as, a business grows, it's always hard to, it's difficult to go back to a client when you, build a website five years ago.
And, they need a new website. It's hard to offer them, the, what, $3,000 site that I did five years ago, because our, prices have gone up and stuff like that. But with ai, we've been able to, still, we, have offerings. Whereas before we didn't have offerings. it needed to be a 15, $20,000 website if it's gonna be on WordPress.
But we've been building these websites with WordPress, building them with a CMS that they can go in and make the changes, which is great, and that works for lots of clients. But there's also a slew of our clients that will just send an email saying, Hey, can you drop this text in, this photo? And then at that point it's like, why are we using a database?
Why are we using WordPress? If that's all, that's how it's gonna work. And so we've, been doing more static, builds, which, I never thought a year ago, I didn't think we were gonna be building, static astro sites. But that's, where we are.
[00:12:03] Nathan Wrigley: And has, has AI become an integral part of that? In other words, in the, on the WordPress side, probably. You are so familiar with how it works that you can, you can do all of that stuff in your sleep on the, on the astro side of things, have you, have you learned that in tandem with ai or have you, you know, got yourself fully skilled in the same way that you were with WordPress or are with WordPress? have you just sort of, okay, let's just work with an AI to make the astrocytes and that's how we're gonna do it going forward?
[00:12:29] Aaron Reimann: So I'd like, I, at this point, I would like to lie in the interview and say, I know astro, forwards and backwards. I, I, know what I need to know. I, I haven't done, to be honest, like there, there's some things in Astro that I'm not super familiar with, like islands and, things like that. But the, the, the SSR, the server side rendering stuff, like we're, using that, we're not just building static sites with that.
So for example, the, the shuffle thing that I gave you, that's an Astro site, that, it does have a database. It uses, the Neon Postgres database to do that. I correct, I don't know it the way I know WordPress, but I also have 20 years of WordPress experience. give me time, and I, feel like I'll, know it almost as well as WordPress, but it's, just gonna take time.
[00:13:28] Nathan Wrigley: So the curious thing there is, I, I wonder at what point we all collectively stopped worrying about what we knew because I, I remember this sort of similar conversation to this maybe, I don't know, years ago, three years ago, something like that. And there was this certain sense of, okay, I'm gonna build it with AI and then I'm gonna double check everything and then I'm gonna do this next thing and then I'm gonna double check everything.
And I don't know when the moment was, but definitely at some point conversation flipped. And it's now to the point where I think most people with the ai, they've kind of reconciled that in their head, I'm gonna get the AI to do it. I'm now going to have a certain degree of trust in it. Only when it's broken on the front end will I feel the need to go and check things. I dunno if that's the case with you still, or if, because you're becoming familiar with Astro and things like that if you're still doing the double checking. But I, most of the people that I've spoken to have definitely jettisoned that as a part of their process. It's just check it if it goes wrong.
[00:14:29] Aaron Reimann: I am, I'm probably am in that camp, where I am, but the way I do it is I'm using other LLMs to check the work of the other LLMs, which I think is, you, have to realise that, programmers that are out there, I've, seen in my career plugins in the WordPress repo that are horribly written.
and, it's like, and, but people don't want to use ai, but I can guarantee you AI is better than half of the developers that are out there.
[00:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:15:13] Aaron Reimann: but also I remember building stuff like when I did my Postgres, P-H-P-C-M-S-I, I was thinking about that. before this, this call. I was like, man, I'd like to go back and look at that code and just see, run a test on that and see how bad was my code 20 years ago.
it was probably was not, it probably wasn't secure. It probably didn't have, it's, not checking things with, AI though, now we're, you tell it to do a security audit, and you do security audits with different LLMs. I think we're moving towards a more secure web with AI because of the fact that developers aren't great.
I'm one of them. I'm not a great developer, but this is where it, I, it used to be a problem that I was a jack of all trades, right? a master of none. but that would, affect me where I couldn't get developer jobs because I don't, know, JavaScript, forwards and backwards and all that.
But at this point now, it's better for me to have a general idea of how these things work and let AI make the decisions. and that's a big shift for me. But I just, I think AI is going to be better than at least 50%, of, the developers that are out there. So I'm not as worried about it. A year ago, I would be like, no, there's no way I'm gonna let ai, build this because it's not, it's going to have holes.
I think, that's changing, and I think by the end of this year, it's, I'm gonna be a hundred percent confident in what, AI is building, so it just gets better all the time.
[00:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: it's such an interesting kind of Rubicon moment, and I dunno exactly when that Rubicon moment was, but it feels like at some point early in this year, there was a moment where whichever model it was and whichever platform you're using to get your ai, where that that calculation became true for almost everybody.
You know, there isn't a great need to do the checking. However, on the flip side, you know, I can hear the people shouting at me down their podcast player, but without the expertise of a human, you know, how are we going to know that the, the problems that ought to be fixed are fixed? In other words, how would you, the prompt that's going to do the checking?
And I can totally get all of that. You know, it would be a great shame if in 10 years time there was nobody left around anymore who had the basic understanding of what it requires to make. Let's go for security. Let's just talk about that one, to make platforms secure, to make sure that, you know, the vulnerabilities across WordPress, across Astro, across PHP and no Js and all of these different things are being taken care of.
Maybe the AI will step up to the plate there and it will be able to do it. But, but I can equally see why people who are, know, they, they don't want WordPress to go away. They don't want to allow AI to step into the, the breach. Here. I can equally see how their, their arguments work as well. I'm terribly confused by it all because on the one hand, it is so unbelievably beguiling, and I'm sure Aaron, like me, you've probably doom scrolled on your phone in the middle of the night knowing it was a dumb thing to do.
It's like totally wasting your time. Nobody's getting any benefit out of it. You should
yet you doom scroll because, well, it's there, right?
[00:18:50] Aaron Reimann: Is there? Yeah.
[00:18:51] Nathan Wrigley: the same is true of this. Like we know that on some systemic level, if we give over everything to the AI and the AI companies, at some point we're gonna have hollowed out the ecosystems, hollowed out the communities such that there's nothing left except the ai. But it's so much fun.
[00:19:12] Aaron Reimann: it ab absolutely is. so, I built a, control panel to, manage my 250 sites or so that, we manage. but, I'm also going to get a friend of mine, he does, penetration testing. I'm gonna get him to go and test this because it, as much as I say AI has got it, I'm still a little nervous.
I still want a human that understands security to go in and, test those things. But, you're right. I think, we're going to have, I, think one of the concerns that I have is that I think creativity, it, maybe I'm, wrong, but I feel like creativity is at risk. meaning it, ai isn't creative.
it just copies, it sees examples and it's like, okay, I can replicate that. but true innovation is it, are we gonna get true innovation in 10 years if everyone's using ai? I don't know. that one of the reasons why I really AI is because I am able to be creative because of the fact that I don't have limitations.
I, have since, March, I have started over 90 GitHub repos. that means not just an idea, it's an idea that is worth creating a repo for to see if I can build it. I've done 90 projects, that's two or three e every two or three days. I have an idea. and it's I am, I, it's like there's no, limitation for me anymore.
It used to be, I have an idea now I need to go get my developer to spend 40 hours to do a prototype. And it's like, not anymore. Now I have my prototype done by the end of the day. and so that's what's really fun for me.
[00:21:16] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sort of interrupt a little bit there. 'cause this also is one of the things that I think is quite confusing because we definitely haven't exited the moment where the bit that I'm about to say matters. And it is, it's one of the capacity to consume, humanity as a whole.
So not, not just me and you or me, you and the WordPress community, everybody. The, the whole of humanity. How much capacity do we have for this stuff? So if you're doing hobby projects and all of that, that's great, but I'm increasingly seeing, you know, people launching Mac apps, which do this one thing, and then you realise like four days later they've released another Mac app and then four days after that, another one and another one. thinking of this particular individual. I mean, it's, it's unbelievable. You know, it would've taken teams years
[00:22:05] Aaron Reimann: Wreck. Yes.
[00:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: guy is putting out. I've downloaded a few of them there, there they work, but he's trying to monetize them. And you think, yeah, but where, where, how does that work? How do we square the circle of, okay, everybody's releasing everything all the time.
What of what capacity do we all have to keep buying these things? 'cause ultimately that's gotta be the calculus, right? If you can't make it profitable at some point, the hobby project, you're just gonna have to admit that's what it is. It's a hobby project. That's the bit that I think we're in at the moment.
We are, we are carried away. We're loving it, we're enjoying it all. But there's a bit of me, which is niggling thinking, where does this end? At what point do we all suddenly realise, oh, nobody's buying this stuff because we're all thinking if I wait a week, somebody will have something better, so I won't buy it.
[00:22:53] Aaron Reimann: the issue is, like I was, I watch a lot of stuff on, YouTube. I don't, I never watch tv, anymore. It's been that way probably for 10 years. but I was watching a clip and I know these numbers are wrong. but I'm, gonna, I'm gonna speak them anyway. I think the numbers were something like, in 2025, the app, the Apple App store had something like, maybe, I think it was 600,000 apps added to, the repo in 2025.
In the first half of 2026, they've already had, 560,000 apps submitted, which means by the end of the year, we're gonna have over a, well over a million new apps in the app store. But the increase of, sales has only gone up 2%. Okay.
[00:23:46] Nathan Wrigley: go.
[00:23:47] Aaron Reimann: we, so people are building stuff, no one's buying it. And one of the things that, so the control panel that I built, I was talking to another agency owner, and she showed me, oh, this, this agency owner also built a control panel, and so did this one go check those two out.
And I, looked at 'em and I'm like, oh, they're selling like mine's, open source. Why? Because anybody can build this stuff now. Like the, it's not if you are, building the, this is my humble opinion, and I'm sure people will disagree with me on this, but if you're building stuff that can be just vibe coded, I don't see how you're gonna make any money off of it.
so to me, open source stuff, get it out there, get let other people use the tools, so, we can work together. open source, just in general, there's, only been a small percentage of people in the world that have ever been able to contribute at the code level to projects. that's changing now.
Lots of people can contribute, because they have ai. Now the, the, the code might be garbage, it might not be great, but at least they can do a pool request. The, the person that runs the application can take it or leave it. but I, I feel I think that's awesome. within, like with WordPress, it's always very few people contribute to core, as far as percentage wise, but now, a lot of people could, if, they wanted to, which, I think is awesome.
That's, that is open source is finally going to be more, used by more people. which, which I think is cool.
[00:25:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's, it, honestly, genuinely, it's such an interesting time. You know, my background at university was history. So, you know, you, you, you look, the, the job of a historian is to, is to not really look at the current climate, but is to look back and try to make, make reasonable guesses as to why this thing happened and what was it that made this thing happen. I think this is such an interesting point because I don't think we've ever had a bond like intellectual abundance like we now do. I don't think there's any point in time where basically we had God-like tools like this. You know, you, you had, if you went to a library, there was all the information that the world could summon up in that great big library, but you couldn't in some way, articulate it or corral it or, or do anything with it.
You, you know, you had to use your human brain to do it. Now at the, all it takes is a sentence prompt for that to become available. I am, I'm really, really some of me's nervous. Some of me thinks it's great font, some of me thinks it's really interesting, but I do wonder what the systemic of that is going to be.
And so, you know, as a historian, I'd be looking back and thinking, okay, gosh, you know, we're now in the year 2030. Well, it was pretty obvious in the year 2026, this was all going in the wrong direction. I'm not sure we are not going in the wrong direction. I hope we're not, and I hope that everything's fun, but there's a bit of me which worries that if we, if so many pillars of what we do, order to provide an income for ourselves are undermined by the, by typing into a box and letting it spit something out, those bits haven't yet been felt, but I think they are going to be felt.
And, and really that comes down to the capacity for people to gain employment in the tech space in particular. You know, if you're a farmer, suspect you're gonna be fine. And if you're a plasterer or a bricklayer or a chef, I reckon you're probably fine for a good while. But in our industry, not
[00:27:44] Aaron Reimann: don't know. I like, chefs, can be replaced now that, especially, and not that I necessarily want to talk about robots, but is
[00:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: I
[00:27:59] Aaron Reimann: it is it going to be in a year we're gonna have a $5,000 robot that I can just put in my kitchen, and say, Hey, cook dinner,
[00:28:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:28:12] Aaron Reimann: and have an unlimited, what do you want?
You want sushi? You want Yeah. it is that
[00:28:19] Nathan Wrigley: that's,
great. It's such a, I mean, how wonderful is
[00:28:24] Aaron Reimann: it's great and scary.
[00:28:26] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, exactly. It, there's equal measures of both. But I think the bit that we haven't yet had to deal with is this whole idea that, let, let's go for the industrial revolution, for example. The industrial revolution was a time in which many jobs kind of got completely hijacked because machines did things well, really all that you did there is that you replaced the brawn of, of a thousand human beings by the brawn of one giant metal thing made of iron that spun around and what have you.
And now, you know, the job of a thousand human beings could be done by one machine that spun round and round. there was a beachhead there. Those workers could over time run and do, work, which required the brain and obviously in, in the west. Ever since then, that's exactly what we all went and did.
You know, we went and found jobs, which required us to think for a living. And so no technology could combat that. So we've, if you, if you categorise us back basically as Braun and Brains, well, Braun was given up in the industrial revolution largely, but until 2022, say, we still have brains to rely on. That was gonna be our, that's our Trump card.
We are always gonna win against tech because we can outthink it. not sure we can do that anymore. And if our Braun left us a hundred years ago and now our brain superiority is leaving us, I don't know what the heck we do. I mean, do we get enjoyment about, staring at a computer? Do we get enjoyment of looking at a machine, which chops up our beautiful sushi for us?
Where do we get the money to pay for that machine? You know, it's all of these kind of
[00:30:06] Aaron Reimann: it's also you, talked about the industrial revolution. How, many, I'm not a historian, although I love, love history. What, how many, the industrial revolution, how many decades was that?
[00:30:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. I mean, you're talking like, I mean, it isn't a hundred years, but it took a very
[00:30:26] Aaron Reimann: That
[00:30:27] Nathan Wrigley: to,
[00:30:28] Aaron Reimann: multiple generations, right?
[00:30:29] Nathan Wrigley: certainly. Yeah. Yeah.
slow evolution and uptake because those, those machines were hard to manufacture. Society had to be reconfigured, people had to move into different housing situations.
It's very complicated.
[00:30:42] Aaron Reimann: And now
[00:30:43] Nathan Wrigley: at the speed of an electron.
[00:30:45] Aaron Reimann: EE exactly. That's, the problem. We don't have time to adapt. We have things like, Kodak created the digital camera, I think in 1974, but they, instead of adapting and changing and building that, no one uses a Kodak, digital camera, right? Or I'm sure there is. I'm sure it exists, but, they,
[00:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: somebody is you.
[00:31:10] Aaron Reimann: you know, but, I'm just saying they're not known as, the ones that created it and, and because they, saw, what?
We're making a whole lot of money off of the old school way of doing it with the, photography, with the, the film. I couldn't even think of the word,
[00:31:29] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. The, the
[00:31:30] Aaron Reimann: Yeah,
[00:31:31] Nathan Wrigley: to cherish so
[00:31:33] Aaron Reimann: and they're like, so, they, lost. and we, you think about like blockbuster video, like they, Netflix went to them offered to, be bought for $50 million and Blockbuster was like, nah, we're gonna do it the old school way.
We like, the, system we have, and it's, that's, you we all have to adapt. We all have to change. I don't know what it looks like next year. I don't know what it looks like three months from now, but, I'm, about to turn 50. Not excited about that.
[00:32:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I've been
[00:32:11] Aaron Reimann: and, to be honest, I wish I were about 10 years older, so I could just
[00:32:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:32:16] Aaron Reimann: I could just retire and just but, I've got to adapt.
And so we are having to change at a pace that humans have never felt before.
[00:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: so this is a curious thing, right? And, and this is one of the, the things which I find so interesting is that sentence, seems to carry water, in the, you know, say it, we have to adapt. Do we, do we have to adapt? Or is it possible that, like, let's say that, okay, so let, let's just imagine a dystopian scenario, right?
So we're, we're imagining something in the future. Let's say that in the year 2028, of people have lost jobs. There's mass unemployment. I mean, obviously we don't wish for this to happen, but let's imagine that that happens. it's not outside of the realms of possibility for society to turn around and say, you know what? is dumb. We we're allowing this technology to, to, to banja us so much. don't we just put it back in a box and there'll be people who say, no, no, no, no, no. You have to always have to move forward. There always has to be exploration and innovation and what have you. but you look over your shoulder and you think, yeah, but look, there's like 4 million people on the, on the streets that weren't there a few years ago. Maybe we should put this back in the box. I don't know if that's coming, but I don't see that as out of the realms of possibility. And it won't be much comfort for the people on the street to be told.
[00:33:52] Aaron Reimann: Yeah.
[00:33:52] Nathan Wrigley: but it's fine. We're just moving forwards. You know, few of us are fine, but you know,
[00:33:58] Aaron Reimann: Yeah. Yeah. I like, I, get that. And I, and to be honest, if we could go back 10 years and, almost, I just had a flashback for Terminator, go back in time and re you know, let's, reset, let's reset, let's de destroy the robots before they, which is unfortunate that, like Terminator was, a lot more fictitious, 20 years ago than it is now.
[00:34:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:34:34] Aaron Reimann: but, that, the problem is, that the, it's already out there's, and there's no way we can revert because if we're gonna revert a hundred percent of everybody, every nation, everywhere has to revert. at least that's how I, see
[00:34:50] Nathan Wrigley: no,
[00:34:50] Aaron Reimann: it's
[00:34:51] Nathan Wrigley: it. Like
[00:34:51] Aaron Reimann: yeah.
[00:34:52] Nathan Wrigley: almost the, you know, like just saying it out loud like I did doesn't mean it's possible. I mean,
this, if really society collapsed, I'm sure that we probably would have the, to think, okay, what were the causes of this? Let's, let's undo it. But as a historian, I can, I can tell you Aaron, history is littered with catastrophically stupid decisions. I mean, really profoundly stupid decisions which affected adversely the lives of millions and possibly billions. You and I are lucky enough to have lived through peace in our time. You know, obviously, dear listener, if you are in a part of the world where that truth isn't, you know, true for you, I'm sorry, I'm not meaning to make light of it, but where, where we've been born in a time of abundance, you know, I mean the, the most, the, the majority of people have to worry about is, you know, how nice your life is gonna be.
Not whether it's going to be nice, you know, you might get sick or what have you. I understand all that, but history shows that that isn't always the way, and it is possible that, that that, you know, we'll have some sort of calamity in the future. Gosh, I am being a domer today. I'm so sorry.
[00:36:05] Aaron Reimann: Oh, that's all good. when, you and I were born, starvation was still a thing.
[00:36:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:36:12] Aaron Reimann: now the chances of someone dying of starvation and, don't get me wrong, I'm sure there that happens, but, as far as like a whole nation, because I, remember, in the eighties, there were always those commercials, for, in Ethiopia where people are, man, you're, depressing.
You're bringing, you're forcing me to bring these things up.
[00:36:36] Nathan Wrigley: up bandaid and live aid
[00:36:38] Aaron Reimann: It's like, oh man. that, that was always, those, those commercials were out there, but that's, that problem is overall solved. and, you're right. We, have, we are in the world of abundance. and it, I don't, know what, AI looks like in two years.
It,
[00:37:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. Yeah. I
[00:37:07] Aaron Reimann: I, don't know what it looks like in two months, So, it's, concerning. but I, it would be hard for me to go back though too, because I've seen my productivity go up so high. I'm building so much stuff. It's
[00:37:25] Nathan Wrigley: the
[00:37:25] Aaron Reimann: I don't know. it's like I don't wanna let it go, Sure. If every, every single person in the world would, could decide, but you have anthropic, you have, Zuckerberg and Altman and all those people that are going to just push. I think we're pushing, I think the whole we're gonna have next year is gonna be a horrible, financial year because all the bubble's gonna burst.
I was around for the, the.com, bubble.
[00:38:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:38:00] Aaron Reimann: this is going to be significantly worse. because it's, it, the problem is, that it's, a lot of hype. it is a great tool, but it's just a tool. and that's how I see it. It's just, I'm able to use a tool because I know WordPress, because I know PHP, like I can, build things that are great.
I've had last, was it yesterday, I had a client, reach out and they said, Hey, we built an application. Can we put it, we have a, we sell dedicated server. some clients will have their own dedicated server. They said, we built this, can we put it on the server? And I'm like, stop.
And I'm like, I don't, trust what you wrote. I don't, like I, I would have to spend some time and learn and make sure that's not going to tank, what's on the existing server, So, it's like, I'm cool doing it because I have 30 years of web experience. Do I want randos, building applications and deploying, no.
that's, not, that's scarier, to, to me.
[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I, I genuinely don't know. I, I'm really caught, on the one hand, I'm very positive. I love playing with all this stuff. I mean, I, I'm not in the weeds of it in this quite the same way that you are, but I, I enjoy, at the output of other people. And I enjoy the capacity for, people who are, have no experience to be able to do things.
Like, there's just no bit of that, which sounds bad. It's all wonderful. You know, a, a a 12-year-old child could build a credible web application, you know, to help them with, I dunno, whatever they're doing at school or
to do as a hobby. Like, all of that is suddenly available. But equally, there's a bit of me, which is like, well, let's put on the brakes.
Let's just try to figure out where this all ends up. because of, I guess with the historian in me, I just sort of worry about that a little bit. yeah, I, I don't, I can't square the circle. I, I'm confused. I think I will be confused. I think basically it's just gonna be a waiting game.
[00:40:11] Aaron Reimann: I think we're all a little confused. it, is, it's, a lot of change. It's a lot of uncertainty and no one, feels, I, no one feels safe when, you are uncertain. and, I still have, my numbers are, doing well, but that doesn't mean that in three months there isn't something out there that basically just ruins the way my whole industry, does stuff.
It's, changing. It hasn't completely, we're, it's interesting because we used to build websites because humans would go to the websites to read the information, and, now it's
[00:40:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:40:59] Aaron Reimann: yeah, but now people are just saying, Hey, I need, new tyres. Where do I go?
and it's so they, they talk to Claude, Claude goes and researches the websites, and returns, like we're, not using the web the way we used to, but we still need the website to exist because the crawlers, the bots have to be able to get that information about the business, So does it matter what a website looks like anymore
[00:41:30] Nathan Wrigley: it just need to be a text
[00:41:31] Aaron Reimann: Cor Correct. and and we're seeing stuff like that. there's a, what is it? LLM txt file that Yeah. so, we're, clearly pivoting and we're, we clearly want to make sure that websites look good in case a human uses it.
I'm fast forwarding a little bit here. 'cause I still think there's a lot of people that still go to websites, but that number is dropping dramatically. it's not, like how it was a couple years ago.
[00:42:06] Nathan Wrigley: I think basically what I'm advocating for is I want there to be a website Stone Age. I want
[00:42:11] Aaron Reimann: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:42:12] Nathan Wrigley: be, be how it was like eight years ago. Can we just stay there?
[00:42:17] Aaron Reimann: I.
[00:42:17] Nathan Wrigley: was so, there was so much wonderful stuff already happening. Can we, can we just stay there please?
[00:42:22] Aaron Reimann: to be honest, I would've been real happy with, what, was, it Fable? Fable five? when Fable five came out in June-ish or so? I'm like, Please, stop there, because, and let's not let the whole world use it. Let's just let you know. People that understand, technology, use it.
that would've been glorious. That's not gonna happen.
[00:42:47] Nathan Wrigley: But we, we can't resist can we? If, if there's a big red button somewhere and there's a sign pointing at the red button saying, don't press the red button.
[00:42:55] Aaron Reimann: But what does it do?
[00:42:56] Nathan Wrigley: and press the red button
[00:42:57] Aaron Reimann: What does it do? I wanna push it.
[00:42:58] Nathan Wrigley: what's it do, what's it actually do? And I think it's a bit like that. And so we haven't quite figured out what, where the, so it's generally speaking that this problem is classified as the alignment problem. And the alignment problem is, does this, whole industry of technology, you know, we'll just broadly call it ai, is it aligned with the goals of human beings?
[00:43:21] Aaron Reimann: No.
[00:43:21] Nathan Wrigley: it isn't and we push through, that might end up, you know, unseating an awful lot of assumptions we've got about society and universal basic income and all of these kind of things. and I'm not sure if many of the things that we're doing to ourselves at the moment are in the long term aligned with the long term interests of humanity. I mean, it's definitely aligned with f it's definitely aligned with having a nice time in the short
[00:43:49] Aaron Reimann: While it, lasts.
[00:43:51] Nathan Wrigley: right, in the short term, it's aligned with productivity. But if everything becomes so productive that no humans need to be involved in anything anymore, then well,
[00:44:01] Aaron Reimann: What's the point?
[00:44:01] Nathan Wrigley: great
[00:44:02] Aaron Reimann: Yeah, I absolutely, but, who I don't know. Let's, let's schedule something for a year from now and figure out how, bad, how, wrong are we? How right are we?
[00:44:16] Nathan Wrigley: There'll be no electricity at that point. Aaron.
[00:44:19] Aaron Reimann: So maybe we'll have to schedule it, for six months maybe. Maybe I'm being too optimistic that we're all alive in a year, but.
[00:44:26] Nathan Wrigley: thing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So there we go. I was gonna link to a bunch of stuff that Aaron's done, but I think probably with the time that we've got,
[00:44:33] Aaron Reimann: Oh, it's all good.
[00:44:34] Nathan Wrigley: what I've got, I, I'll link to them in the show notes. So, Aaron provided me with a bunch of links to projects that he's been working on, so you can go and have a, a little play around and what have you.
But, yeah, we don't have the answers. We only have the concern and the worry and the scepticism and the doubt and the interest and all of those things. But, appreciate you chatting to me today and being very honest about all that. That's lovely. And, yeah, I'll see you in 2027 if we're all
[00:44:59] Aaron Reimann: May, maybe if we're alive. So if the, the, Terminator hasn't gotten us yet, but.
[00:45:06] Nathan Wrigley: they say on top gear and on that bombshell,
[00:45:10] Aaron Reimann: Yes. Fair enough. I appreciate it. Thank you for your time.
[00:45:13] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.
