I grew up in Moldova in the 90s.
That means I didn't get Lego. I got whatever fell off the back of whatever truck came through Chișinău that season. Chinese plastic bricks in colors that didn't exist in nature. A Soviet-era metal construction set that I genuinely think was designed to teach children about pain from being hit with dull metal parts, my toes hurt, alot some days.
Pieces where limited, none of it fit together properly. I don't mean this metaphorically. The pieces physically did not connect.
So you learned to jam them together anyway. You held things in place with your thumb while the glue dried. You figured out that if you bent the metal at exactly the right angle, not the right angle the instructions wanted but a different right angle, it would stay. You made structures that had no business standing up. And then they'd stand up, and that was the whole point.
I'm telling you this because I think it explains something about why the AI conversation drives me a little crazy.
At some point, real Lego showed up. I don't remember exactly when, maybe '98, maybe '00, something like that. And the first time a brick actually snapped cleanly onto another brick, I remember just sitting there for a second. You could build things on purpose. The pieces did what you wanted. And then they kept releasing new sets. New shapes. New mechanisms. Technic. Things with gears. Things with little motors.
Each time, same reflex: what can I build with this?
I never once thought to ask whether the new pieces were worthy of the old pieces. It would not have occurred to me. The old pieces were bent metal trash. The new pieces were better. You grabbed them and started building.
Here's what I keep bumping into now.
There are people who've been building things for twenty, thirty years. Good people. People who know their craft in a way that's hard to explain, the kind of knowing that lives in your hands, not your head. They put in the time.
And now here's this weird new thing that a twenty-three-year-old can pick up over a weekend and produce something that looks, from a distance, like what those people spent a decade learning to make.
That stings. I'm not going to pretend it doesn't.
But here's where I get stuck.
You didn't get good by protecting what you already knew. You got good by grabbing every new thing that showed up and asking what you could do with it. That wasn't a phase you went through on your way to expertise. That curiosity was the expertise. That itch is the whole reason you're worth listening to today.
At some point the job changed from building to running the museum. And I want to ask, gently, because I mean this: when did that happen? When did a new set of blocks stop feeling like an invitation and start feeling like a threat to the collection?
Because that's what it looks like from where I'm standing. Someone built something real, something they're proud of, and they stopped. The job shifted from building to protecting the building. And anything that shows up and says "hey, what if we tried a different kind of brick" gets treated like an attack instead of an invitation.
I know change is disorienting. I know some of what AI produces is genuinely mediocre and people are right to say so, especially we have all the crypto-bros taking the game, I get it. But there's a version of this conversation that's just nostalgia dressed up as principle. And I think a lot of the loudest voices are living there.
The tools kept changing. They always did.
Machine code. Then assembly. Then C. Then higher-level languages. Then IDEs with autocomplete. Then Stack Overflow. Then Copilot. Now this.
Each time, same question: what can I build with this?
Here's what's funny. Most programmers have no real idea what happens inside a compiler. You write code, something churns, a binary comes out. A few people truly understand what's in between. Most don't. Nobody cared. They used it anyway and built things that mattered.
AI is a black box. Sure. So was every tool before it.
The only thing that was ever actually yours wasn't the tool. It was the instinct to pick it up.