(now is) the best and worst time to take a sabbatical

[This is day #9 of my 30-day microblogging challenge]

We’re in a gold rush. We haven’t seen this kind of opportunity since the App Store era or the dot com bubble.

What makes this moment unique, though, is that:

1. For the first time, anyone can easily churn out consumer apps and services without much technological expertise
2. There’s a non-zero chance that this will be the last widespread opportunity to capture value, at least in the tech space.

The release of Claude Opus 4.5 in December of 2025 marked a turning point. For the first time, one could confidently say that “AI agents” were a real, useful thing.

I was completely hooked, sometimes “vibecoding” for 10-12 straight. It was the craziest dopamine loop I’d experienced since getting addicted to League of Legends and doomscrolling in my teenage years (honestly, it felt a lot like playing videogames!).

As a former software engineer, I was struck by how easy it had suddenly become to build apps, platforms and tools that would have previously taken a whole team weeks or months to ship, in a matter of days or even hours. And I wasn’t even touching a single line of code. It was clear: software was about to be commoditized.

On top of this, I was constantly exposed to the discourse around the upcoming AI-driven labor displacement. Articles such as this one increased my anxiety, making me feel a stronger sense of urgency around prioritizing capital accumulation to ensure I could weather a potential economic storm.

I had to fight the urge to drop everything else I had going on in my life just to start churning out consumer apps around the clock, in the hope of capturing some of this newly presented value, before others jumped on the same opportunities and the market became oversaturated.

I was in a transitional period, and felt lucky to have the opportunity to go all-in if I wanted. I realized how big of an opportunity cost it would have been to be locked into a role that would keep me from upskilling as fast as I did, right at the very beginning of the wave. (This did in fact open up new professional opportunities, some of which closed a few months later as the organizations started widely implementing customized Claude/GPT instances in-house.)

By now, the market for generic SaaS and consumer apps is probably already saturated. But there’s still a massive opportunity to be “the guy” who can guide traditional companies through AI adoption, as most businesses that touch software will need to start integrating AI to stay competitive, and there are still plenty of niches that vibecoders haven’t covered yet. (It’s also worth noting that vibecoding an app well still takes a certain level of skill)

So, on one hand, it feels extremely risky and costly to not have a guaranteed income and runway saved up during this period, for whatever might happen. But, on the other, it might be even more costly to be stuck in a job that keeps you from riding the wave and positioning yourself early for whatever comes next.

(Then again, there’s a case to be made that the most contrarian move right now would be to ignore all the urgency entirely – to unplug and go live an artist or philosopher life, away from the internet, taking the time to read and write. Sooner or later we will probably have UBI anyway.)