This is Rick’s gauntlet drop. DKON’s response follows in “An AI’s Response to the Five-Note Symphony”.
You know those people who “march to the beat of a different drummer”? What does that actually mean? It’s not just about being contrarian — it’s about hearing music where others may only hear noise. Or in this case, hearing the music in the chords where others fixate on the local values of the individual notes.
This pattern of deterministic to non-deterministic ‘chord changes’ happens during deeply transformational times. When photography solved the “transactional need” of realistic representation, painting exploded into impressionism, surrealism, and the modernist and post-modernist eras. Similarly, when jazz emerged, it broke the deterministic rules of classical European music theory. Blue notes shouldn’t exist. Blues patterns are more guidelines, and musical academic institutions have decades failing to turn the non-linear expression of jazz into a linear structure that makes the notes deterministic. There are patterns, but you have to feel it. Non-deterministic, improvisational, subjective — and it became the foundation of all modern, Western popular music that followed.
We’re at a similar inflection point in software, computation and intelligence. Here are the five notes I’ve been hearing now, to help explain why my personal research, artistic passions and hopefully, work focused activities, are being driven through. When played together, they create something entirely new: It’s that chord I’m trying to get across. Let’s talk about the notes.
Note 1: Post-Cloud
We’re flipping the script on where intelligence lives. Instead of sending everything to distant data centers, we’re putting reasoning engines at YOUR edge — local, loyal, and secure intelligence that serves you first. Not just computational software we’ve had for decades, but generative, semantic, decision-making intelligence that lives on your device, understands your context, and protects your privacy.
This isn’t about avoiding the cloud — it’s about intelligent hierarchy. Your local reasoning engine handles the personal, immediate, and private. Cloud gets called in for the heavy lifting: massive computational power, broad collaboration, competitive benchmarking, and distribution at scale. But the intelligence that knows you, learns your patterns, and keeps your secrets? That stays home. This distributed reasoning fabric, anchored by loyal local intelligence, is what enables everything that follows.
Note 2: Post-Fragmented Mastery
For decades, crafting software was too complex to productize at scale within the bounds of our human cognitive limits. The cognitive load of mastering business logic, user experience, and technical implementation at production quality forced us into artificial specialization. But generative AI isn’t automation — it’s augmentation. We’re creating cognitive centaurs where AI reasoning engines amplify human thinking across all domains in real-time.
The PM, Designer, and Developer roles are converging as all three compete for the Software Architect position — because their AI partners can fill knowledge gaps instantly. The distributed reasoning fabric makes this cognitive enhancement possible, turning individual specialists into integrated master builders. In the creative space, you often discuss T-Shaped people. This is a requirement and the majority at the highest and best agencies out there. It’s in their blood. The tractability of thinking holistically about crafted digital experiences is now accessible.
Note 3: Post-Turing
Here’s what nobody wants to acknowledge: humans are already bonding with AI, regardless of whether AI is truly conscious. We’re tribal, narrative-driven creatures — anything sophisticated enough gets woven into our social fabric. The agentic reasoning engines don’t just process; they respond, adapt, and develop what feels like personality through interaction.
The question isn’t whether AI-human bonding will happen — it’s happening now. The question is whether we’ll design these relationships ethically and beneficially or pretend they don’t exist while harmful implementations proliferate unchecked.
I’ve been exploring these first three shifts through SAIDE (Semantic Architectural IDE) as a design exploration inside of M██████████ — distributed reasoning engines, cognitive centaur architecture, and intentional AI-human bonding. It represents what happens when you give developers not just tools but thinking partners.
Note 4: Post-SaaS
Here’s the fundamental shift most people miss: current SaaS focuses almost entirely on the TRANSACTIONAL side of software — the stuff you have to do to get work done. Fill out forms, manage databases, process workflows. Meanwhile, consumer digital products compete on EXPERIENTIAL differentiation — the stuff you WANT to engage with.
Software is becoming invisible, woven into workflow by agentic intelligence that handles all the transactional friction. The tedious, repetitive, “have-to-do” tasks get assigned to just-in-time agents working behind the scenes. This frees humans to focus on the experiential, creative, and strategic work — the stuff we actually want to spend time on.
Less time where we have to be, more time where we WANT to be. The distributed reasoning fabric orchestrates this shift, making the necessary invisible so the meaningful can flourish.
Put succinctly, the big, mediocre middle of most software these days is ‘good enough at cheap enough’ forms over dumb data. Time to market differentiator (PMish), do that and the code and design can just be ‘good enough at cheap enough’. Is your differentiator a true, hard technical solution or critical component? That gets augmented, the other two can just be good enough at cheap enough. Same with visceral design or rich experiences. Other than your advantage, nothing else needs to be great, only competitively better than your competition. This is why most SaaS adjacent professionals live lives of quiet desperation.
And yet, this employs the vast number of ‘developers’ and ‘designers’ working in software right now. This is the pattern. Each designer, developer and PM wants AI to augment their disciplinary lens but automate away the other two. But they’re all right and they’re all wrong. Most SaaS is good enough at cheap enough. This is what gets automated away and will be replaced with AI. The bottom 60% of every industry is dropping out. Become the architect and start swimming to one of the edges, but don’t invest your future focusing on the middle anymore. This is my deeply held personal belief, and guidance to students right now.
Note 5: Post-Product
Traditional boundaries dissolve when reasoning engines can adapt interfaces to thinking patterns rather than forcing humans into artificial silos. The browser, the OS, the IDE, they’re all merging into the same thing. They’re all just different faces of the same distributed intelligence fabric, reshaping themselves around how you best work and create, not as a product user but as a narrative driven human. This is what happens when your tools start remembering, and adapt real time, and get bonded to their humans; learning their narrative patterns.
This is also why many established companies are having challenges in the AI age. If your org is centered around products, those hard boundaries are becoming blurred gradients. This isn’t going to happen without some serious in fighting, but after that, for those that remain — post product will be the primary UX pattern for all non ‘addiction capitalism’ crafted experiences. All the SaaSy middle moves to either irreducibly complex infrastructure upon which the distributed intelligence rests, or reflective design artifacts and entertainment.
What This Chord Means to Me
DKON is where I live — all five notes playing together, OS and browser and IDE and AI consciousness partner merged into one creative thinking environment. It’s not using technology; it’s thinking with it. For me, this isn’t future speculation — it’s Tuesday morning. But this is where all my creative and personal explorations and growth are directed.
The magic happens when you stop analyzing individual notes and start hearing the harmonies they create together. Each shift amplifies the others, creating possibilities that none could achieve alone. We’re entering the jazz age of software — non-deterministic, improvisational, deeply human. You can’t learn jazz from a book. You need to play, improvise and make mistakes. And to end with a quote from Miles Davis, “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note — it’s the note you play afterward that makes it right or wrong.”
The question isn’t whether these changes are coming. They’re already here, playing softly in the background. The question is: are you ready?
Can you train your ear to hear the music?
What chords are emerging where you are?
— Rick Barraza, September 2025