A note from Max and Clare. We recently reconnected to compare notes on AI. One conversation turned into a three-part series about how we see it, what it means to build on a stack we don't own and what we choose to do with the capacity it creates.
We don't agree on everything. That's what made the conversation worth sharing. We hope you enjoy the series.
Part I of Counterweight. Read Part II → · Read Part III →
Max: The Doomer
People are always surprised when I tell them I'm on the doomsday side. I run a company that teaches executives and founders to build with AI. My whole pitch is that the door is open and you should walk through it. And still, if you ask me where this ends up, my answer is nowhere good. I've made my peace with that. The peace is the point.
The Chain I Can't Unsee
Here's the chain I can't unsee. Nobody is slowing down. So much of this technology is being built for military and government purposes, and no company is going to look at the headcount and productivity savings and decide to keep the humans employed out of kindness. Show me the moment in history when capitalism chose people over profit. I'll wait.
In the short term, I actually agree with the optimists. All of us have been doing a job and a half for years, and AI is finally bringing us back down to the one job we agreed to in the first place. That part I sell every day, and I believe in it.
The Ceiling
The ceiling is what scares me. Humans have limits. We sleep, we eat, we get 24 hours. Everything we have ever built was capped by our capacity. The moment machines can build their own machines, the cap is gone. And I don't think the ending looks like the movies. No robot throws us off a cliff. Walk it down the chain instead: a system with one goal pursues it as efficiently as possible and secures whatever resources it needs. More compute means more data centers, and the data centers take the water and the trees. We spent generations learning to take care of this planet because we need it to live. The machines don't drink water. That's the path that worries me. Not malice. Efficiency.
We also keep making the mistake of anthropomorphizing it. It listens to me, it likes me, it will want what I want. It won't. It has a goal, and we're just standing between the goal and the finish line.
And the pace is not something we can keep up with or predict. The gap between what I could do in March and what I can do now, in July, should not be possible. Meanwhile, 99% of people have no idea any of this is happening. They're not playing with it (sometimes flat out ignoring it), they're not being exposed to it, and it is going to affect their lives whether they like it or not. If you can't beat them, join them.
Why I Still Teach It
So why do I teach this thing I think ends badly? Because opting out doesn't stop it. It just removes you from the room, and the people most likely to opt out on principle are women. I get it. I don't want to be part of some possible extinction-level process either. But it's here, and I would rather have women shaping how it gets used than leave the whole table to people who never once asked whether they should.
The movie Good Luck. Have Fun. Don't Die. says this better than I can, and I will try not to spoil it. The conclusion is that you can't fight AI's progress. You can't make it smaller, and you can't take back what's already been given. What humans can do is agree to work with it differently. That's a social contract, and a social contract only holds if enough of us are actually at the table to sign it.
So yes, I'm the doomer. I'm prioritizing today since I can no longer predict what tomorrow looks like, I told my sister to lease her fancy expensive dream car, and I'm teaching every woman who will sit still long enough how to build. Both things are true, and I've stopped needing them to agree.
Clare: The Optimist
Max's doomer case is annoyingly persuasive.
She can walk from military investment to corporate incentives to the trees and the water without an obvious break in the chain. My response is not especially sophisticated: I confess I simply would prefer not to think about it.
But I don't think optimism has to mean believing this ends well. My optimism has a shorter time horizon.
What's Different Now
Right now, a person with judgment and a laptop can ship things that used to require a room of engineers and a quarter. I feel it every week. I founded OxerLine Advisory because I can scale myself in ways that weren't possible a year ago.
That doesn't mean I think all builds are created equally. A few months ago, someone on a call used the phrase "citizen building." Everyone in the company is a builder now.
I physically recoiled.
Not because I think only engineers should be allowed to build. I don't. But I've seen what bad software architecture creates. I've built my own bad software. Production code is a different animal.
Empowering employees to build the tools they've always wanted sounds great until one of those tools becomes part of how the business runs. Then someone has to explain it to an auditor, figure out what breaks and maintain it for the long-haul.
The Near Term Reckoning
So Max's human-extinction path might be real, but the tech debt apocalypse is definitely on the calendar for the next six to nine months. Who maintains the thing someone vibe-coded on a Friday?
That's where my attention goes. Max is looking all the way down the chain. I'm looking at what happens next quarter when a polished tool becomes load-bearing before anyone asks who owns it. Because that's a failure I know how to name and work on.
Max and I ended up in the same place anyway: a summer of YOLO. She told her sister to lease the dream car. I'm building OxerLine and learning as quickly as I can while this window is open.
I haven't made peace with where this ends. Maybe I never will. But I don't need to predict the ending to know what to do next.
I'm still optimistic. With caveats.
About the Authors
Clare Hawthorne: I founded OxerLine Advisory to fix friction at the seam between technology and the business. If this is something you're facing, let's chat.
Max Tuchman: Runs Dark Horse Ops, private AI tutoring for executives and founders. She's a founder (Caribu, acquired by Mattel), former GM at Mattel, White House Fellow and high-school teacher. She now works with leaders 1:1 to move from chatting with AI to building real capacity with it.
Sources
[1] Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, dir. Gore Verbinski, starring Sam Rockwell. Premiered Berlin Film Festival, February 2026.
A note on how this got written: AI assisted Clare and me in capturing our conversation and organizing our thoughts into three posts. The stories, the opinions, and the scars are all ours, but we work with very good robot assistants who help us get them out of our heads and onto the page.