Welcome to nickintheloop

A newsletter about staying a step ahead of the AI paradigm shift

I will be honest with you: I am equally fascinated and equally worried about where the AI advancements are taking us.

Every week I watch something that feels impossible become normal. Artificial intelligence and agents are aggressively automating parts of my work, and parts of my life. Heck, there are now robots being built to be sold as personal assistants, and that is not really a fantasy anymore. It feels about three to five years away, and maybe that is generous.

So I keep asking the same question. Where is this actually going? For me, for you, for our jobs, our companies, and our everyday life.

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There is no shortage of takes on AI. There is a shortage of clear ones.

Most of what reaches you is either hype trying to sell you something, or doom trying to scare you, with a lot of slop in between. There is no clean, concrete answer about where this goes. But once you filter all that out, you can start making some calculated predictions.

And here is the hard part of any paradigm shift: the old way of doing things quietly stops working, and most people keep going as if nothing changed. It is genuinely hard to see the shift while you are standing inside it.

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Here is one thing I have already learned from putting AI to work inside real companies. The bottleneck is no longer whether you can build something. Building is becoming dramatically cheaper and faster. The scarce skill is knowing what is worth building in the first place: taste, judgment, and the ability to see what should exist.

That quietly reshapes a lot of jobs. I think we are entering an era where the most valuable people are the ones who can combine creativity, judgment, and execution: who can turn a vague idea into a working thing, and also judge whether it should exist at all. I have started calling this person the creative engineer.

That is the kind of lens I want to build here. Not “AI is coming,” but what specifically changes, and what you can do about it.

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So what is nickintheloop?

It is short, sharp takes on the AI Paradigm Shift as it actually unfolds: what is happening, what it means, and what I would do about it. I pull from what I see on my day to day work and from what is moving across the wider world.

I get a useful vantage point for this. I work at Prosus, one of the world’s largest consumer-internet groups, putting frontier AI to work inside products used by millions of people across Latin America, Europe, India, and Asia. That is a front-row view of what is actually working with AI right now, across very different markets.

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nickintheloop is for the AI-curious, not just the technical. If you are not in AI but you want to understand where it is taking us, you are exactly who I write for. I try to make everything make sense for the person in the middle.

I also do not want this to be a monologue. The best version of this is a small group of curious people reflecting on these ideas together, because I want to hear what you are seeing too.

One more bet: We are moving from AI as a copilot, something that helps you while you work, to an autopilot, something that runs whole pieces of work across your tools and on your behalf. Most people are still treating it like a copilot but reality is AI agents are now able to perceive environments, make decisions, and execute multi-step workflows without constant human intervention.

So if you want to understand where AI is actually going, without the hype, the doom, or the jargon, subscribe. Every week I will share what I am seeing inside real companies, what I think actually matters, and how I am shifting my own mindset to be better prepared for the next few years.

And tell me:

Welcome to nickintheloop!