I remember the exact moments when major transitions in my life happened. The first time I got a BASIC program working. The first time someone used one of my programs. My first email. The first time I visited a website. The first time I made a website. The first time I saw my future wife. The first time I held each of my children.

In each of these moments, I knew things changed and at the same time I had no comprehension of how they would change the direction of my life. It is like there was a fog in front of me, I could see vague outlines of things.

When I look back on my career as a Web Developer, I’ve been involved in many major transitions: The Web being a thing that you had to care about; Dial-up to Broadband enabling a step-change in the types of experiences we could interact with; The Desktop to Mobile transition and all the change that this brought for the web - At Google we felt that we had to go bring the web to mobile, so I focused on Mobile-first as a primary motivator, then a push on Progressive Web Apps as the way that all apps should be built and experienced.

Through these later transitions I felt I could clearly see the path that I or my teams should take. Getting my hands on an iPhone and instantly it felt clear to me that the web needed to work well on mobile because this is where the future will be. Later given the growth of mobile and the fact that for billions of people it was their first experience with a computer it was quickly obvious. It felt clear that there was an existential risk to the web and that there would need to be a solutions for the centralization of Apps - which our solution would become “Progressive Web Apps” - it all felt pretty clear.

But each of these transitions to the web wrought a lot of change.

• Dial-up to Broadband - The web became a desktop-class hosting platform for applications and fundamentally changed how Windows worked, leading to the rise of Web aggregators like Google, and the creation of services like YouTube, all because the increase in bandwidth and reduction in latency meant that you could do surf more and developers could deliver more. Many of the services we once relied on (anyone remember MapQuest?) were obliterated nearly over night by more interactive and engaging services. Always being on meant always having access to email, instant messaging, social, Flash games, audio and video.
• Desktop to Mobile - You could see the web just not working well on iPhone-like mobile devices, and while it took a bit of time for Apps to find their mobile-first footing (i.e, not just a port of the Desktop experience) the web clearly took a lot longer to be mobile-first, or even responsive. Yes, Responsive design had been around prior to the launch of the iPhone, but it wasn’t until 2015 when Google search started a mobile-first push that the ecosystem really started to move. My own involvement in this project started a lot earlier as I could see an explosive growth of mobile because of reductions in price of the device and massive improvements to connectivity in India and China meant that people’s first computing devices might never highlight the web.

Some people see the transition far ahead of time. I had friends who built a web browser for Windows CE because they saw the rise of Nokia phones and could see the next jump to a more powerful experience and wanted to ensure that web worked well on these devices. I didn’t see that then, I just saw terrible WAP sites. However, I could feel the change with the iPhone.

It was the same with LLMs. The first time that I used an LLM was in the OpenAI playground… I believe it was GPT 2, and I just didn’t think that this was going to be a fundamental shift in the way that we interact with computers. I couldn’t see how this was going to change the way that we interacted with the web. I didn’t see how this would change how I build software almost overnight. I just couldn’t see how this was could change the way that we interacted with our devices.

I remember thinking: “That’s a neat trick”. And then I got on with my life.

Like many people, I think this changed when we first played with ChatGPT. It wasn’t perfect, it was slow, but I got it building a simple web app in a few minutes and I could feel that this had the potential to change the way that I work and the way that people interact with computers. I remember clear as day, sitting next to my wife on the couch saying that everything is going to change.

It feels clear that we are in the midst of another major transition, and I’m at a personal transition. I’m at a point where I was thinking about what I want to do next with what I think will be the next huge shift for computing. I’ve been working on the web nearly 30 years and working at Google for 15 of those and my fundamental question is: What is going to happen to the web?

What I do know is that I love the web, I think it’s the best platform to write once and reach everyone. I love seeing that the web is the place where people are experimenting with the entire range of delivery of AI experiences to people, be it access to Large Language Models, Image Segmentation, Video analysis, or even new flavours of search.

I want to be at the forefront of the medium that is the web, and the potential new platform that is “AI” (we need a much better name) and aifoc.us is my own personal place to muse on a lot of questions about this transition.

ps, Blame Barry Pollard for this domain name.