A lot of people are worried that, now that artificial intelligence gives you the answers, you no longer go to websites. You just go to the search engine, or to the Perplexity or ChatGPT page, and you ask your questions. It searches the internet for you and gives you the answers.
And many are worried - rightly - about what the incentive is to build sites, to create content, if people don’t then jump onto my site.
Today I had an epiphany that is maybe even worse than that: pretty soon, not even the search engine.
The metro closing times
Let me tell you what happened to me. I was writing code with the help of vibe coding inside Visual Studio Code, with a plugin called Roo Code. There are lots of them, one of the many agents that help you program.
Out of laziness, at a certain point, I needed to find out the metro timetable. And instead of opening the browser, searching for the ATAC site with the schedules, jumping onto the ATAC site, seeing what time the metro closes and so on - ATAC being the Roman transport company, public or partly public, who cares - out of laziness I asked directly. I asked the agent inside Visual Studio Code: “When does the metro close today in Rome?”
Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the editor, or with what a coding agent is supposed to do.
And it answered me. It answered me, and that surprised me on the spot. In reality I’d left MCP servers connected to Visual Studio Code since the day before: Brave search via the Brave APIs, and Fetch, to grab little pages from the internet, which I normally use for library documentation.
I hadn’t put it together - or maybe unconsciously I had, I don’t know - that while you’re working, when you need something that has nothing to do with what you’re doing, you can just say “look this up for me, tell me that.” And not only did I not open the ATAC site, I didn’t open the search engine either. Not only that: I didn’t even open the browser.
It’s already changing everything
I really did have a moment of epiphany, because we talk about it a lot, but then it happens. So I’m asking you: does it happen to you that things that used to take you 5, 10, 20 minutes now take 20 seconds? Does it happen that instead of thinking deeply about something, you think longer about how to phrase the question, so that with one well-described question you launch the agent into a deep search, and it comes back to you with structured answers that you may or may not then verify?
Everything is changing, and in my opinion a lot of people are underestimating what is happening. We’re on top of it, and I think we see it slightly ahead of time - maybe because we program, we’re technical. But between here and two or three months, the time it takes for graphical interfaces to be built, things get made for ordinary people who do something else in life.
We are getting a preview of something, folks, that is mind-blowing. It is not an exaggeration to say that artificial intelligence changes everything. It will change everything. It already has.
Get a move on.
