Building with Words

How Communication Shapes Our Future

A New Frontier of Building

Imagine this: You sit down, a steaming cup of tea in hand, the faint clink of the spoon against porcelain as you stir. You lean toward your tablet and say, “Build me a chess clock with a camera that snaps a photo of the board after each move.” Steam curls up as the AI hums, already writing code for your device, sketching a circuit board, and modeling a sleek case to 3D print—all before your tea’s gone cold. This may seem like sci-fi, but this reality is closer than ever. New tech is driving it, sure, but the real magic grows from our ability to talk to these tools. We’re entering a new era of building that begins with simple language and a knack for saying it well. You don’t need four years of engineering or design school anymore—it’s open to anyone with an idea and the words to match. In this shifting time, there’s new weight on how we use language and how we connect with one another.

A Legacy of Building and Communication

My grandpa Don was more than a builder—he was a generous family man who shaped how things got made. Running Al Neyer Inc., he was an early pioneer of the design-build approach, pulling creativity and construction under one roof. He lived to serve, a Catholic heart always giving back to his community. My dad, Joe, carried that forward his own way, a carpenter with an artisan’s touch. He’d draft up home designs with a client, pencil flying, making it theirs as much as his. He not only communicated through his work, but he also was an author, writing about his own journey of living and dying in his book, Too Much Fun Dying to Stop Now. I’ve got sawdust in my blood from them both, finding my own path to building through my studies in computer science and creative technology and my work as a software engineer, and my own path to communication through ecopsychology and community work. Their legacy taught me creation and connection go hand in hand.

The Tools They Are a Changing

My dad leaned on his hammer, nails, and drafting pencil—tools not far from his dad’s. But Joe had access to power tools and equipment that my grandpa never dreamed of during his career. As a software builder, my tools are different, and even that’s flipped since I started 15 years ago. Back then, I’d be writing out Python and JavaScript, line by line, to make an app tick. Now? Last week I sat down with a friend who needed a website and within 15 minutes of interviewing and 10 minutes of prompting, we had a website put together that blew his mind. Tools keep shifting; a good builder learns them to shape what’s needed. Today, I don’t code as much—I articulate what the software should be, and the AI fills in the blanks. It’s a higher abstraction, a larger leap, but the game’s the same: say it clear and make it real.

Creation as Conversation

Around this time last year, some friends and I were back and forth dialoguing about an app to foster more spontaneous local connection. While the vision started coming in clearer, in our busy schedules it was hard to nail it down. A couple weeks ago, I picked it back up, spent an hour or two in a back and forth conversation with an AI to refine the vision, and then I passed it to my AI builder, and in less than 6 hours of work, I had an app built that would have taken me months to put together. My creative process feels less split-off now. I’ve always loved rich talks—philosophy, psychology, politics, whatever—separate from my tech side, which faded over time. But they’re merging. My knack for dialogue makes me a better builder in this digital world. And the best stuff? It comes from human-to-human talks—two views clashing gently, sparking clarity that, with these tools, turns into form fast.

Building a Connected Future

What are you building these days? Who’s it for? Who’s it with? As our tools speed us up, we can craft a world that works for everyone. To build something lasting, we need clear understanding—and that comes best together. Let’s step into an era where tech doesn’t replace relationships but grows from them, supporting how we connect. I’d love to know you—what you’re making, who you are. Much of my focus right now is building better tools for local communities to connect, surfacing what’s happening in an area and making it easier to connect with the people you actually care about—as well as putting these tools in the hands of people by supporting open-source and self-hostable software. If that’s something that interests you, I’d love to chat more. We are entering an era of collaboration, so let’s stay connected.

My collaborator Jon.bo and I, hanging in the park working. He used his voice to direct his AI to write code and debug, while I walked around dictating this essay and occasionally chatting with AI for feedback and suggested revisions.