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 fast the Year of our Lord 2027 and I realized there is not a single mention of AI across the entire dd9.com website. In many ways that has been a huge point of pride. DD9 is 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 provide for our clients via that new toolset.
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. 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, 100% human.
But this brings me back to the DD9 tagline on the homepage:
Handcrafted
Code + Pixels
We have used that tagline for some time. It’s supposed to instill a sense of quality, craftsmanship and expertise in both software development and graphic design domains.
But is anything 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, “handcrafted” was always a liberal analogy to physical craftsmanship. But there was some real “hand typing” and “hand drawing” going on in prior years, and the analogy worked.
Now, it’s much, much less of direct hands-on, typing code, manipulating pixels work.
But here is the kicker, and frankly, the interesting part.
The tools have changed, we touch things from afar and there is less hand-on and there is no denying that. We now do more 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. AI 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 workslop 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.
