Microsoft and Meta have unveiled new AI autocoding tools. According to The Register, they’re meant to cut costs and reduce the “cognitive load” on developers. That sounds nice—though the “cognitive load” reduced for me has been the prospect of dealing with developers, who think a working contact form entitles them to £500 and a smug little footer linking back to their portfolio.

Coding is not and never was magic. It was just a set of instructions that some people learned before everyone else. Then they made a career out of pretending it was difficult—until now. AI doesn’t pretend. It just does the job. And that means anyone who can think clearly can build what he wants without begging for help or paying someone to “get back to you” after the weekend. For the avoidance of doubt, I’ve never had to do any of this, but I do have an uncle who’s been ripped off mightily over the years by these people.

Look at the Libertarian Alliance website. Mr Bickley has given this to me to run. I make the widgets. I decide what gets shown and how. I agree, it looks a bit amateurish. That’s the point. We’re not selling vegan tote bags. We’re not some think tank with corporate donors to impress. We are a group of people who want to destroy the managerial State and explain why taxation is theft. The site looks like an old blog because it is one—and because that kind of honesty is effective. There are no tracking pixels, no smooth-talking design language meant to flatter you into clicking “Donate.” We’re not trying to manipulate. We’re trying to persuade. Oh—but, if you want to donate, don’t suppose I’m trying to put you off: the relevant buttons should be easy to find.

Still, the site does what it needs to. Author blocks, category filters, searchable archives, Bulleted footnotes. These things work, and they were all generated using AI. I wrote a few lines when I had to, but mostly I typed instructions like “Make a two-column layout with a right sidebar for author profiles,” and the machine delivered—not always perfectly, but near enough. And it did better than waiting three weeks for someone else to send back a quote.

That’s the beauty of this new world. It saves time. It saves money. It ends the grift.

You used to have to pay someone to build anything more advanced than a contact form. And he always acted like he was doing you a favour. “We’ll scope this out in Sprint 3.” “Our designer will send over wireframes.” “We’ll need access to your FTP.” And then he’d charge you for the time he spent forgetting your name. All of that is gone, or going.

Now, you can ask a machine. And if it doesn’t understand, you rephrase. No invoices. No passive-aggressive emails. No delays. Just results.

Of course, the people being replaced aren’t thrilled. They’re used to thinking of themselves as clever. They learned JavaScript before it was cool. They have laptops covered in stickers. They say things like “civic tech,” and they vote Labour, even when Labour is more evidently crap than it ever was. They assumed automation would only affect the greasy and the unskilled. That it would sweep away warehouse workers and Uber drivers, not “knowledge workers” like them.

But the machines have learned to type. Worse, they’ve learned to listen.

This is not a catastrophe. It is justice. And not just because they overcharged for years, but because they tried to make themselves irreplaceable by making everything around them obscure. They used jargon to lock you out. They built bloat and called it “scalability.” They acted like the only way to make a website was with a team of six and a fifteen-page project brief.

That’s over. And it should be. AI makes code simple again. Not because it’s dumbing things down, but because it no longer needs to flatter someone’s career path. It just wants to work.

And what that means, for busy people like me is that we don’t have to wait. I don’t have to pretend to respect someone’s ten years of experience in React when I just want a sidebar. I don’t have to book a meeting to ask whether the font can be smaller. I can do it myself. I can do it in seconds. And that leaves me with more time for what matters: reading Greek, writing polemics, schoolwork, heavier weights, looking even better than I already do, general enjoyment of the body and mind I’ve been enterprising enough to develop.

This is not the death of creativity. It’s the death of middlemen. And we can all be freer and better-looking for it.