I spoke at Web Unleashed in Toronto this morning. The talk was called "Stop Typing Code. Start Designing Systems." and it's about how AI has changed the way we build software... but I told the whole thing through my dad's dairy barn.

Web Unleashed is FITC's web and front-end conference here in Toronto, and it's on today and tomorrow (October 27 and 28). My session was this morning at 10 in Room 405. It's about moving from typing code to designing systems: how MCP lets an agent reach right into your CMS and your other tools, and how to build things a client can actually run without calling you. If you were there, thanks for coming! If you weren't, the session page has the full description, and there's still a whole day of sessions tomorrow.

It went great! The room was packed, there were even people standing, and there were tons of questions (we went over time). People kept talking to me after, too. A lot of people really aligned with the idea that the industry is changing and our jobs are changing, and they want to shift into a mindset about how they can work now. And everyone loved the concept of having fun at work.

Every picture in that deck was made by ChatGPT. And honestly, I think the pictures are the more interesting part of the story, so here they are, next to the real photos they started from.

The story, real quick

When my dad was a kid, his job was helping his dad milk cows. By hand. Him, his father, his brothers and the hired men could milk about 25 cows together, and the milk had to be delivered THAT DAY or it would spoil.

In the 1970s Dad built a new barn with milking machines and a bulk cooling tank, and he could milk 40 cows on his own. He was still accountable for every single drop of milk that came out of those udders! But he could do a LOT more work, and the quality was actually MUCH higher. His job was never really about milking cows.

Dad was also a master carpenter, and he hated power tools. He built things with tools that were a hundred years old. He didn't give up the craft when the barn got the machines, he moved it to the workshop.

That was basically the talk... our job was never really about typing code either.

How I made the pictures

I talked the whole idea through with Claude, and it built the first version of the deck and wrote a prompt for every picture. Then I took those prompts over to ChatGPT, gave it a handful of real photos of Dad and me, and asked it to remix them into a hand-painted, watercolour storybook look. Some took a few tries, and I swapped a few out for better ones along the way.

Here's what came back.

The first slide

The opening slide has Dad at his barn and me at my desk downtown. I gave ChatGPT three photos for this one.

It put Dad, hat and all, leaning on a barn gate with the cows behind him, and stuck me at a laptop with the CN Tower out the window.

I'll be honest, I got a little emotional at the images of me and my dad together (this one, and the one at the top of this post that I closed the talk with). It's been a long time. And even though they're AI generated images, they certainly had a big emotional response from me.

Dad in the workshop

The real one is Dad out in the field with his tiller. ChatGPT took him inside and gave him a hand plane and a wall of old chisels and saws, and NOT a power tool in sight.

Me in the early 2000s

This was the slide about 25 years of typing code. I remember working on cineplex.com, the biggest website around at the time, and trying to get that thing deployed on the same day Spider-Man 3 came out. It was a nightmare, but I learned SO MUCH.

ChatGPT put me at a big beige CRT monitor covered in sticky notes... and hung kids' drawings on the wall behind me.

Me now

This was for the slide about my developers leading teams of AI agents instead of typing code. Same maroon shirt, but now I'm at a whiteboard and the agents are these glowing blobs working away at laptops.

The barn

And these two are the barn itself, the 1950s and the 1970s.

The barn in these doesn't look ANYTHING like the actual barn. I couldn't find a real photo of the barn my dad built, so ChatGPT just made one up. I'll see if I can dig one out.

What's actually cool is that my brother-in-law lives on the same property right now, and he's rebuilding one of the older barns. He converted the old dairy barn into a pretty good manufacturing shop for woodworking... kitchens, pretty complex CNC projects, and other great stuff.

Being upfront about it

I told the room I used AI to help build this talk, and I'm saying it here too. Claude did a lot of the typing, ChatGPT did the pictures, but the stories are all mine. And Dad's. Which is kind of the whole point of the talk... let the machines do the milking.

So, which one's your favourite? And where's your workshop?