A few weeks ago, a coin dropped in my head with a resounding clang. In its wake, my entire way of working changed dramatically — and my productivity shot to an all-time high.
---
I'm surrounded by technological systems.
These systems are tied to the White Tiger e-commerce site and the product-management servers that power it, to servers I maintain for clients, and to the diverse and fascinating collection of systems featured on Channel 10.
What all of these have in common is that not one of them was built from scratch by artificial intelligence — at least not as of today (and that "today" matters).
With all due respect to the staggering advances in AI capabilities, building a complex system from scratch using AI alone is still an enormously difficult task.
Anyone who has tried knows the process well. The first prompt produces something jaw-dropping, but from there things grow steadily more tangled as the system's complexity increases.
On the servers of companies like Lovable and Base44, vast piles of assorted "applications" sit in quiet repose — everything from the one-million-and-first task-management system to the unicorn that will supposedly replace Salesforce.
What they all share is an impressive surge of capability on day one, followed by a slow, steady decline in the days that follow, which typically ends with the idea being abandoned altogether.
---
In contrast to the instant-gratification illusion that the vibe-coding world sells us, the open-source platform ecosystem offers an endless library of high-quality, ready-made software solutions for virtually every need imaginable.
Say you run a clothing store and decide to launch an e-commerce website.
With an investment of a few hours, you can learn how to set up a virtual server and deploy a hosting platform on it — CloudPanel, for instance. From there you can move on to a full e-commerce site, a marketing-stack management platform, an automation platform, a CRM system, and more, all without paying a single dollar in licensing fees.
The advantage of using a mature, established open-source system over building something with AI is stability and the polish of a real product — one that tens of thousands of developers have labored over and contributed their time to improving for years.
---
The problem that remains with open-source platforms is time.
The WordPress site you installed on your server won't fill itself with products, designed pages, and terms of service. The CRM system won't integrate itself with your website and mail server. When bots attack the site, it won't connect itself to Cloudflare and configure firewalls on its own.
All of these things demand endless hours of work — and hours of work are a cost no less real than money, and perhaps more so.
---
The glue that binds all these pieces together is an agentic browser, and that's a fact that even the companies developing these browsers haven't fully grasped.
Perplexity has been offering Comet for several months now — a browser with an AI assistant capable of navigating between web pages, clicking on fields, and filling in text.
The company markets it as a personal assistant for research, office work, and form-filling. That's a bit like presenting a bulldozer as the best tool for opening tin cans.
The true power of an agentic browser lies precisely in this: bridging the gap between the empty open-source platform we've set up and the content and configuration that need to be poured into it to serve our specific use case.
Instead of paying a fortune to various specialists, all that's required is to open the open-source system we've built in a tab inside the agentic browser and ask it to get to work.
Naturally, the broader our technical knowledge, the better we'll know what to ask for, how to spot mistakes, and how to propose creative approaches to implementing solutions — but the agentic browser is the best and most diligent worker we could ever hope for.
I'm still there, darting between screens running in parallel, refining requests, correcting errors, or implementing things manually — but the feeling is that the future has finally arrived.
I'm surrounded by the team of assistants I always needed, and together our output is soaring.