09What AI can and can't do

Worth knowing the ceiling. Both the bottom one and the top one.

At the bottom - things that take an evening. A one-page site, a Telegram bot, a script that renames a thousand files for you. A couple of hours, and it works.

In the middle - what people do seriously. Paid services, dashboards, bots that watch something and send alerts. Weeks of work, but now within reach of one person. The site you're reading is exactly this: seven languages, a catalogue of four hundred tools, a live funding scanner across some thirty exchanges. All of it built by one person together with AI.

At the top - actual science. AI is being used to find new drugs, and it has reached the final test: in summer 2026 a lung fibrosis drug, where AI found both the target in the body and the molecule itself, entered the third and last phase of trials. No AI-designed drug has been approved yet, and most candidates fail in trials. But this is lab work now, not promises in a pitch deck.

Now what it can't do. It can't want things for you. It doesn't know what your users need. It won't finish the project if you drop it. And it doesn't replace understanding: if you have no idea what you're building, you won't notice when it gets something wrong.