It’s been a long time since I have written a blog post. Sure, there have been a couple of launch posts here or there, but I have not written a “thought piece” in more than a decade. I often have ideas, and even full-blown sentences kicking around in my head, but rarely have the will to turn them into more than a paragraph, so I end up writing nothing at all.
But recently we have seen some truly seismic structural shifts in the digital industries that are directly rippling through DD9, and I figured it was time: We had better have the AI talk.
First and foremost, we are approaching the Year of our Lord 2027 and I realized there is not a single mention of AI across our entire site. In some ways that has been a huge point of pride. We were not hopping on an AI bandwagon and trying to sell ill-conceived, half-baked AI services and products. There shall be no snake oil sold here.
BUT the omission also ignores the fact that AI has indeed become absolutely integral to our day-to-day workflows. We have not articulated how DD9 uses AI internally, nor what benefit we have been able to produce for our clients in that process.
And of course we have not said anything about a few hard lessons from the AI trenches, because believe me, there are very real boundaries and limitations to AI assistance, and we have seen them.
My hope is to start documenting all of this in the coming months. I may use AI to assist in that later, but I am writing this first post by hand.
But this brings me back to the DD9 tagline on the homepage:
Handcrafted
Code + Pixels
We have used that for some time. It’s supposed to instill a sense of quality, craftsmanship and expertise in both the software development and graphic design domains.
Is it really “handcrafted” any more? I haven’t personally fired up a code editor in more than six months, and even opening design applications is becoming less frequent. Playing devil’s advocate, it was always an analogy to physical craftsmanship. But there was some real “hand typing” and “hand drawing” going on, and the analogy worked.
Now, it’s much, much less of that work.
But here is the kicker, and frankly, the interesting part. The tools have changed, there is no denying that. We now do more directing. Dictation, review, iteration, repeat. It’s much more of a director job than a craftsman job.
But at DD9 we still approach it like a craftsman-trained director. That attention to detail and pursuit of quality still sets us apart. AI does not replace the human eye, judgement and attention. It imitates it, and does a great job at so many things, but there is still a huge difference between a human doing thoughtful work with AI tools and one-prompt-and-call-it-a-day work product.
So, back to the tagline. This is where I landed:
Maybe we start that way, try an honest approach to the changing times and see how it goes.
