The stories coming out of the iPhone Duo launch paint a grim tableau: someone lifts a very expensive folding phone out of an elegant box, opens it as though it were a booby-trapped relic, and then the boulder comes rolling (or, less cinematically, the screen has already cracked). Reading enough of them returned me to a question I have been turning over since the day Apple blocked my Haxies: has Apple fundamentally changed, or is it simply doing what it has always done, only now with a hinge?

Having spent more of my adult life inside Apple's ecosystem than I would care to total up, I have come to believe the answer is both. On the hardware side, Apple is repeating a pattern that stretches back decades, and anyone who has been paying attention should find it more familiar than shocking. What has changed is the layer of human care that used to sit beneath those products and catch us when they failed, and the slow disappearance of that layer tells us a good deal about where the rest of the technology industry is heading, now that every company on earth has discovered AI.

Generative AI has fundamentally changed the friction of writing code. Recently, I looked at a few websites I built with subscription site builders and considered the ethics of using an LLM to convert those visual designs into independently hosted HTML.

As someone who builds technical infrastructure for legal environments, I find this to be a significant ethical gray area that is coming up more often as AI tools make coding tasks more accessible. AI makes it incredibly easy to feed a screenshot to a model like Claude and ask it to interpret the visual layout. It is crucial to note that Claude is not copying or scraping the underlying source code. It simply looks at the site's general aesthetic and writes entirely new code from scratch. Still, this capability forces us to separate the strict legal right to copy from the ethical obligations we owe to developers and designers.

What rebuilding a small nonprofit's website taught me about leading with AI

For years I've volunteered as the designer and maintainer of the website for The Jamin Fund, a small Colorado charity that supports education and leadership in memory of Jamin B. Wilson. Jamin was a close friend throughout high school and college. We shared a love of all things Apple, creative coding, and learning for its own sake.

Recently a volunteer reported a strange bug. One of the tiles on the home page, "School Building Projects," only worked if you clicked it very quickly. Wait a moment and the link went dead.

The fix turned out to be two lines of HTML. What I learned from fixing it took a lot longer to work through.