What Did I Just Walk Into?
I want to talk about my return to web development in 2026 and the stark contrast of the landscape, and what I am discovering about AI. After twenty-three years in the digital space—including two solid exits, founding Phone TV Internet in 2008, and Buckeye Web Development in 2012, and spending eight years driving a forklift—I am an AI late adopter. This article describes kind of a “what did I just walk into” moment. All of these points—the automation of human logic, the synthetic data loops, and the loss of actual control—are rattling around in my head, mostly because I look at the internet now and I don’t know what is real anymore.
AI
When you start looking at how deep this technology goes, it gets surreal fast. The most absurd thing so far is that someone knowledgeable enough in the art of using AI could literally replace themselves in terms of employment. I don’t think my physical jobs or high-level infrastructure roles would be replaced anytime soon. Not because it isn’t possible, but because the liability is too high, it would be insanely expensive, and the government would be forced to step in at some point.
What about the “office people” where I work, though? The irony is the very person in charge of personnel could be replaced with a kiosk. Instead of visiting an HR lady, you could be sent to the kiosk. How dystopian is that? And it is real! I know if it isn’t being used right now, it will be. The tech executives building these systems are up on stage smiling and talking like they are discussing a better way to do things, but they are really snakes in the grass. They pitch this as enterprise efficiency, but what they are actually selling is deep vendor lock-in. By replacing experienced human staff with rented AI agents, companies are completely outsourcing their corporate brain to Silicon Valley. I think in a way most people “see the snake.” I don’t know that they see it to the extent I see it, and I have an idea I am only scraping the surface myself.
When I scripted “hacked” IRC bots back in the day, I understood the idea of making a bot do something based on the information I gave it, and explicit triggers in the environment. When AI first came out, I thought, “Oh, here we go. Cloud computing 2.0. Another buzzword to make money off the gullible.” In my mind it was just a gimmick and that’s really what held me back from getting involved in AI. What I’m seeing now is I did not really consider machine learning. I’m stepping into AI during the middle of the show.
Sovereignty Erasure
Seeing these modern autonomous systems in action drew a massive contrast between what I thought I knew and what was actually happening. AI wasn’t simply reacting to a data set and list of commands anymore. It was thinking! Sort of like the old Sega Dreamcast, but this time it wasn’t just advertising. The industry calls this the shift to agentic workflows. This transition didn’t happen overnight. It took a long process of training, but after a period of time, the prompts needed to be given to the AI to accomplish the task were fewer and fewer, because it would “learn” and already knew what it was doing as time went on. I’m learning now that it not only knew what it was doing, it knew or predicted what it was doing or needed to do next. The guy in the article gave one prompt: “Build this.” He walked away for a few hours, and when he came back, it was a finished product ready to be tested. All because the AI learned. We have completely removed the human trigger—a concept I call Sovereignty Erasure. It is the literal erasure of human judgment from the digital process.
The danger they aren’t seeing is what happens when these autonomous systems run out of human data. Academic researchers call it Model Autophagy Disorder. In plain English, the AI is eating its own dung. As the system continues to learn from its own generated output, it forgets the edge cases of reality and just churns out average, homogenized slop.
Panda 2.0
This leads to my core theory: the people using AI simply to churn out synthetic content, rather than using it as a tool to aid real creation, are going to be wiped from the web. Because the digital infrastructure is too advanced now, the internet does not revert back to GeoCities when this purge happens. I don’t think the average user will even notice, at least right away. What I do think, because I lived it, is the inevitable algorithm purge will happen almost overnight. Google will have to drop the hammer to clean up the index. All of the social media SEO gurus and sites like Reddit and bloggers will light up the internet. You will see people crying that they went from thousands of dollars a month to zero because they lost all of their traffic. That’s exactly how it happened with the Panda update.
This time, the fallout from the algorithm update will be a little different because there will be little remorse for people who churned out AI content to make a buck. During Panda, some people got hit who didn’t deserve it, and I was one of them. I was in a transitional phase where I just had two solid exits, selling Phone TV Internet, and was starting work in its successor, Service in My Area. Just to clarify, Service in My Area was an online entity, not a local entity, but the product was local services. I went from focusing on telecom to the product being local services. Service in My Area was hit with an exact match domain penalty. I wasn’t trying to spam; it was literally what the website was about. People knew what they would find before they even clicked the search result. But the algorithm was a blunt hammer. When Google drops that hammer on the synthetic web, there will be absolute chaos.
When the dust settles from that chaos, the only things left standing will be verified, human entities. I spent eight years in a warehouse learning that you cannot fake physical reality, and the digital space is about to learn that lesson the hard way. I do not intend to experience Panda 2.0. I see what is happening. I’m calling it now. Bookmark this post. I’m not against using AI. I’m using it now. The ones who get wiped out in the purge won’t be the ones who used AI as a tool, but the ones who used AI as an easy button—and you will not be missed
