Ride the Wave: Why AI Isn’t Just the Future—It’s the Present

By Konnor Willison

As AI rapidly transforms industries, those who fail to adapt risk being left behind. Discover how leveraging AI in your workflow isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity to stay competitive.

It took:

These are just a few examples of how rapidly technology can evolve within a single human lifetime. Now, imagine living through that progress, witnessing firsthand as these groundbreaking inventions shifted from science fiction to everyday reality.

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Fast forward to today—AI has already disrupted a wide range of jobs and industries, and it’s only going to keep accelerating. Just look at the advances the leading large language models (LLMs) have made in the last year alone. If you’re not paying attention, you might be underestimating just how fast things are moving.

I was recently chatting with a family member who works in real estate, and to my shock, they hadn’t even touched ChatGPT or anything similar. They were completely unaware of the insane value they were missing out on. From automating routine tasks to helping streamline everything from property research to client communications, LLMs can augment nearly any job, real estate included. If you’re not using tools like ChatGPT, you’re already behind the curve.

Let’s shift the focus to the area most relevant to me—software development.

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I’ve been riding this AI wave for the last few years, primarily focused on solving problems for customers. Over the last two years (ChatGPT 3.5), my usage of LLMs has gone from casual to mission critical. I started with simple tasks—proofreading emails, making my responses sound smoother, and generating SQL queries (albeit clunky ones). Fast forward to today: AI is writing about 90% of my code and nearly 40% of our team’s overall code output.

One of the most powerful implementations we’ve made is an in-house version of ChatGPT 4o. Out of the box, it functions like the standard model, but we’ve trained it on company-specific data to handle internal queries related to HR, processes, and documentation. Need to know how to request PTO or find an obscure company policy? Just ask our AI. This not only saves time but also empowers employees to get relevant answers without the back-and-forth that drains productivity.

Now, let’s talk about speed and scale—two things I’m obsessed with when running a software team. We use tools like Cursor to help developers code across multiple tech stacks. Cursor isn’t just about writing more code—it’s about writing better, more secure code. We’re shipping more features, faster, and the quality? Higher than ever. Cursor even has a feature that compares your branch with the main branch, identifies breaking changes, and allows you to fix them on the fly. It’s basically a cheat code for pull requests. When I demoed this to a friend, he was shocked and eventually said: “That’s cheating.”

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And honestly, he’s not wrong. AI is a game-changer, and if you’re a developer who’s only comfortable with one specific stack or language, now’s the time to be a little concerned. AI is making it possible to branch out and tackle unfamiliar territories. I’d never written code for an AWS Lambda function before last month, always avoided it frankly, but using Cursor, I was able to write and deploy a Lambda function in under an hour. That’s not just time-saving, that’s empowering.

Empowerment that we’ve used to do what would usually take 30-40 developers. Our team maintains a codebase with over 3 million lines of code, spanning four different programming languages. We’re handling all of that with just 10 developers. Even after experiencing some attrition on the team, we didn’t panic—we didn’t even backfill those positions. Why? Because AI tools like Cursor continue to help us do more with less.

The future is already here, and I’m beyond excited for what’s coming next. AI is not just a passing trend; it’s the wave of innovation that’s reshaping entire industries. And if you’re not riding that wave, you might get left behind.

So, whether you’re in software, real estate, or any other industry, the message is the same: leverage AI or risk watching from the shore as others ride that wave straight into the future.