Why Not?

ai
thoughts
Author

Wes McKinney

Published

January 11, 2026

We are officially now in the era of “why not?”. Up until about 10 months ago, it was easy to come up with reasons not to build things. Coding agents have changed all that.

I remember what we used to say: too expensive, too much time, not worth it, too little marginal benefit, does not benefit enough people. That’s over now.

A side effect of this is that everyone should be asking “why not?” all the time and daring to build the previously unbuildable or not-worth-it.

This has been a profound transformation for me since there are a lot of types of development work that I avoided in the past. Just to name a few things: sysadmin, homelab, devops/CI/CD, frontend. These things were my kryptonite, and so I would either not touch them or (in the case of open source projects or companies) delegate this work to people who were better at it and enjoyed it. Now all of my skill gaps have been filled in (at least for the 80% of use cases which turns out to be good enough for 99% of the work).

I’ve been having fun doing all kinds of stuff:

I don’t quite know what to think about this weird, exciting new world we have entered. This Neo-in-the-matrix vibe. But I’m here for it.

Why not?