--- title: Change and adaptation date: 2026-09-03T13:12:00-04:00 author: John Morton canonical_url: "https://supergeekery.com/blog/change-and-adaptation" section: Blog --- # Change and adaptation *September 3, 2026* by John Morton *Audio narration available for this post.* This post isn’t my typical nerd post. I’m in a contemplative frame of mind and just felt like writing. Until the past year or so, if you asked me “what do you do,” I had an easy answer that I was happy to share. I’d tell you that I run my own digital production company with a great friend of mine. That company was called JMX2, which I co-founded and ran with my friend, Jon, for about 17 years. We found a way to do the work we wanted to do on our terms and we had fun doing it. I often say that Jon and I got lucky. My husband would try to correct me and say that hard work played a big role. Yes, we did work hard. But, a lot of people work hard and have a passion for what they are doing. It doesn’t always work out. But we were lucky enough that it did for us. We were in the right place at the right time and our personal interests aligned with what the world was willing to pay us money to do. In December 2024, Jon and I officially closed JMX2. It’s now nearing the end of 2026 which make our closing date seem in the distant past, but it’s still fairly fresh for me. We closed our company because our work volume had begun to slow down throughout 2024. One of our biggest clients spent the year pulling the consistent big projects we had been doing for them for over a decade back inside the company using internal resources. They were making a big shift to focus on integrating AI into their company and budgets for external vendors was an easy place to cut expenses. Other client work was also growing scarcer. It just felt like it was the right time to close shop. Jon and I took our remaining client work and split it up. As the clock ran out on 2024, we completed all the paperwork to officially close. It was only last month, on August 14, 2026, that we finally shut down the remnants of JMX2. We had maintained our Google Workspace account since our official close. It made sense to us to keep our email and calendars going through 2025, our first year post-closure. Then 2026 rolled around and not dealing with shutting the remaining bits down started to nag at me. Over the summer Jon and I got our old emails archived and calendars moved which let us safely shut down the Google Workspace account. That final piece of JMX2 shutting down made the closure of the company more real to me. It has been a year and a half, so I’ve had time to adjust to it, but it still is a real mark for me. I guess it’s like finally getting a headstone installed for someone who has died. It’s the last step. That sounds more morbid than I intended to make it. I’m still working at my computer every day, but how do I answer the question, “what do you do?” I still find my day to day task list nearly the same as before because what I’ve done for money was also my hobby. Sure, I do have some remaining client work, but it doesn’t fill my day like it used to. I now make things for myself - art projects, software I’ve always wanted and other experiments. What do I do, though? I’m somewhere between “I’m retired” and “ I work for myself full time.” Or at least that’s the closest description I’ve found so far. I’ve fallen hard for AI coding. I love it. I’m building new projects all the time. When we had JMX2, it was the pre-AI era and we hand coded everything by ourselves. We felt the pressure from clients to hire more staff, but we liked the building process and the refinement process. Some of the most fun projects we built at JMX2 were the ones where we were privately skeptical that we could pull off but knew, with enough effort, we could do it. That often ended up with the two of us working every waking hour, but it felt so rewarding to “finish the puzzle” of each of those challenging projects. Now that I’m on my own, I find my own puzzles to do. I have the coding assistants that we never hired while we had JMX2. I have Claude or Codex to go off and complete the tasks that I create. It’s been wonderful. It’s hard to think about giving it up. Could I? Sure, I could try, but I doubt I will. I can finish full projects so quickly and just start using them. If you’ve read other pieces on my blog, you’ll know some of these projects I’ve built. An upload server, a secret sharing service, a cloning text to speech service, a deployment checking service. Each one of these projects is something I think in the before-AI times would be a possible new SASS. I haven’t released any of them as paid services though because I feel that they’re all really developer focused and any developer that I think could benefit from them now has at their hands the ability, with AI, to just reproduce their own versions. In the pre-AI era, I think several of the projects I’ve built could have been viable products or services to sell. The strange thing is that having AI coding tools so readily available has reduced the perceived value of software as a whole. I think the things I’ve built are genuinely high-quality, but I’m not sure most people would recognize—or be willing to pay for—the difference between software that has gone through three weeks of rigorous UX refinement and testing and something they can create in an hour or two by talking to a chatbot. That makes it hard to justify trying to sell them on the difference. At the same time, I still think good software developers are incredibly valuable. For example, yesterday I had a friend show me his website that he was paying someone to build for him. He had specific questions for me around aspects of a user checkout flow that I don't think was being handled very well by the developer he had hired. I talked to him about how I think about these types of problems before I dive in and write any code. I think he would have benefited from a much better developer than he's currently working with, but that will be up for him to decide when he gets the final product from the person he's hired. My assumption is that this developer will probably be using AI behind the scenes, at least to help him or her create the site for my friend. But my impression of what I saw as the end product left me with a lot of worries about what's going on. Since this friend was not asking for me to give that kind of feedback, plus we'd had that conversation in the past before he made the decision to go down his current path, so it didn't feel right to retread old ground. But I want to circle back to what that exchange made me feel about the value of good software developers. Good software developers who understand user experience and have empathy for the end user, combined with an understanding of how systems work, are still incredibly valuable. I think the problem is convincing the people who need software, whether that’s a website or a new mobile app, that they need to either hire a skilled person or be willing to invest the time to teach themselves the skills needed so they can talk to their chatbots and get the end result that they want. But I don't think most people are even aware of the skill set that they need. As an example, I don't feel like I have the skill set needed to do my own taxes. Sure, I could fill out a form, but I'm completely lost when it comes to filling it out correctly, and that's why I hire someone who is skilled at doing that chore. How do I wrap up this long, rambling post? Let's circle back: I closed my company, and I'm not sure exactly what I do now, but, day to day, I still do many of the same things I used to do while I had my company, but now I use AI to help. If I were starting that same company now, I would be fighting the battle of still needing to convince people to pay me for what I do, and pay me well for it, while their perceptions of the value of what I am capable of doing have been eroded by the existence of AI. Where does that leave me? Well, all this change is happening after I've had a good run throughout my career. If I had my choice, I'd still have JMX2 chugging along for a few more years, but that wasn't meant to be. The AI shift happened late enough in my career that, due to my tendency to plan for the worse and hope for the best, I'll be okay. I just hope my younger friends will maintain their footing as the landscape goes through the rapid upheavals we're experiencing. Good luck, friends. --- **Tags:** life, ai, work