Akyao Toolbox

Well, my family, especially my wife, and my few true friends would probably describe me as someone who is lost in thought, has a great many good ideas, starts putting them into practice, but never actually finishes anything. Following the motto: lots of potential, but no ability to get it onto the road. People who do not know me would probably describe me as a loudmouth from the Ruhr area who makes no effort to adapt his behavior to the etiquette around him. They are not entirely wrong, because as long as I am with my boys on the football pitch or away from my role as an employee, I have no desire to pretend to be someone else just to please anybody. I do not like playing roles, even if social conventions sometimes make it necessary.

My professional background is quite broad: officer in the German Navy, including studies in electrical engineering and technical computer science. In 2010 I left the Navy and first disappeared into the Canadian wilderness for several months. My family did not think I would come back alive, because I had acquired my survival skills during a three-day course in Essen's Stadtwald. Somehow, though, I did manage to return alive, and afterwards I travelled all over the world as a software engineer for a German medium-sized plant engineering company.

When I met my wife, my life changed completely for the better. She is Venezuelan, and she opened my eyes to the fact that although it is nice to live in Germany and to live in abundance, there are many places and countries in this world where life is not nearly as comfortable or materialistic. That realization helped me cope mentally and psychologically with my two years in India, because I was working far away from the tourist hotspots.

Even though my wife was not with me, my time in India was extremely valuable because I met wonderful people who helped me find myself. When that adventure was over, my wife and I moved to the United States for work for two years. If anyone had asked us during that phase of our lives where we would like to live permanently, we would both have answered at the same time: “in the USA.”

I do not want to become too political or unfair at this point, but we realized that our conservative values did not entirely fit American culture. Maybe we were simply too trusting and unwilling to use our elbows consistently enough. Whatever the reason, we remained loyal to America as a holiday destination and, together with our boys, experienced a hurricane in 2022. We were not merely nearby; we were right in the middle of it. That was when America showed a very positive quality from which we Germans could learn a lot. The willingness of Americans to help during the first few days after the hurricane was outstanding, and the authorities did everything possible in an incredibly short time to restore the infrastructure.

Afterwards, I tried working for a large corporation in factory automation in northern Hesse. The corporate structures completely wore me down, so I decided to make a fresh start in Krefeld. There, I successfully established a branch office for a British company as managing director.

Now I have reached a point where I feel my intellectual abilities degenerating a little more every day. That is not a criticism of my current employer. We operate in an industry that is very conservative, where robustness, comfort and proven solutions take priority over innovation. But once I have personally had a revelation about what is technically possible today, and I can almost feel and smell the future potential, it is difficult to accept that I should keep breaking down a concrete wall with a hammer even though the excavator has just been invented. And if that excavator only costs €20 a month to lease, it is understandable that I begin to worry that the company may face serious difficulties in the coming years.

AI has meanwhile become a very complex topic on a philosophical level. Some demonize it; others see it as a revelation. I think both views can be right, because it depends on how I use this technology for myself. I see it as a revelation because it allows me to express my creativity beyond my natural limitations.

In discussions, I always compare it to building a house. If I want to build a technically sound house, I need many different trades: an architect, an excavation contractor, a bricklayer, an electrician and so on. Roughly speaking, I need 20 to 30 different trades, all of them specialized in their own field. Building the house itself then takes several months. If we are talking about an airport or a railway station, it can even take decades.

If I want to save money, I can of course build everything on my house myself and only bring in specialists for the critical trades. The disadvantage is that I first have to learn bricklaying, plastering and roofing. And everyone knows that when you do something for the first time, the result usually leaves a lot of room for improvement. Or, put differently: the next time around, you would do ten things differently. Or, if you are like me, you would tear the whole thing down again and have someone do it who actually knows what they are doing.

If I transfer this example, where real human hands are indisputably necessary, to a software project, the power of AI becomes much easier to understand. I still learned assembly programming on an 8086; you cannot get much closer to the foundations than that. Back then my head was really smoking because the debugging and the entire program context had to be processed inside my own brain. If hardware was involved, it became even more complex because the hardware itself was part of the context.

At the same time, I was able to watch young people found software companies in “garages” and become wealthy over time. Back then, games and software were still built by one-man armies. Over the years, requirements increased as technology advanced. Eventually, a point was reached where individuals could no longer compete in terms of time, and development teams became larger and larger. Even today there are countless software teams of battalion strength. They contain an entire army of specialists: frontend, backend, Scrum masters, data engineers, test automation engineers and so on.

Which experts do I still need today? Put very bluntly: if you do it right, perhaps none at all. A few weeks ago, Sam Altman said that it probably would not be long before we see the first one-person company generating a billion dollars in revenue.

Because I am not particularly materialistic, I look at that statement from a different perspective: thanks to AI, we are back in the era of one-person software development. Every software developer with big ideas can leave the office and return to the garage.

I do think that software development in teams will still be necessary in the future. The focus, however, will shift more toward qualification and validation of the code rather than the craft itself. The product developer will move much more into the foreground, because they now have a toolbox that allows them to develop products relatively quickly with limited specialist knowledge or to adapt existing products to changing market needs.

Especially when talking to colleagues and younger people, I notice that the potential of AI is often viewed in a different context. For most people, it is more about making work easier — and I think that often happens unconsciously. In other words, creating more free time.

I let ChatGPT prepare homework for me, or I use it to compensate for gaps in my expertise. AI is a legitimate tool for that, and it should be used for that. Why should I waste parts of my life on things that AI or another system can take care of for me?

For me personally, however, there is another question beyond that: how can AI help me do the things I have always wanted to do but for which I lacked the decisive resources — time, specialist knowledge and money?

I have already answered that question above with the house-building example and the abstraction to software development. AI gives me the ability to act as a one-man army again and realize software projects for which I would normally need a team of twenty people and a year of development time.

Because I am a very complex thinker, my ideas are naturally expensive — both in terms of time and investment. If I now open Visual Studio Code and manage to formulate my ideas reasonably well, within a few hours I can have a prototype that shows me whether my idea can be implemented or not. For that, I only need rudimentary programming skills.

Everything that used to take me forever or distract me from the real work (I hate GUI!!) is now handled by Codex or Claude — and at a quality and speed that actually allows me to concentrate on what matters.

It is like being the head of a software company. I have an idea, call a team meeting, explain the idea in normal human language, and the team takes care of everything and implements it without complaining. When everything is finished, I review the result, and if I do not like something, I say so straight from the hip, and it gets changed without any “but that is going to be really complicated” or “that will take us at least three months” discussions.

That is exactly why I cannot demonize AI. I am aware that there are people who use AI for criminal purposes. States and systems also receive, through AI, a modular toolkit that can take surveillance and espionage to a completely new level. But honestly, that has always been the case and probably always will be. Whatever technological progress humanity has made throughout history, it has always been used for somebody's own purposes.

Should I therefore allow that to take away my joy in being creative? Should I leave all this potential unused because of it? No. Why should I?

Over the past ten years I have experimented with a lot of things. I wrote an autobiography (without AI; it took forever and, well...), started a huge number of software projects (C# and React), produced music and did a thousand other things. Apart from the autobiography, none of it produced a usable result.

So that nobody gets the impression that I neglect my job or my family: I get up every morning at 4:00 a.m. and invest two hours in these projects. Those two hours are my mind gym, and I need that time for my inner balance.

The question I keep asking myself is why a) I hardly ever finish anything and b) what I am doing all of this for in the first place.

A can probably be explained by the fact that I constantly need to challenge my mind. The moment a project leaves the design or prototype phase — the creative part — I feel bored and underchallenged. I drag myself along for a little while longer, but my interest steadily fades, and when a new impulse appears, I do not hesitate for a second before gratefully chasing after it.

B is more difficult to answer. A few days ago I had my autobiography in my hands and read a few lines. I think that, subconsciously, I spend a lot of time thinking about what it is like to be forgotten. If someone asks me today about my great-grandfather or great-grandmother, I cannot even tell them their names. I know neither their stories nor their first names. That is shameful, isn't it? I mean, every ancestor contributed something to making me who I am, yet to this day I have not understood why I am the way I am. One is connected to the other, and if I knew the history of my ancestors, the question of “who I am” would not take up so much space in my life.

With Akyao Toolbox, I more or less outsmart myself when it comes to A, because every individual tool is another new impulse and therefore a new project. The final 10% does not drag on for so long, so I can finish it before a new thought in the shower sends me into another creative phase. I think the Toolbox also brings me closer to B, because I am making something that comes from the heart and gives me a deep sense of inner fulfilment. The two or three intense hours in front of the computer have a meditative quality for me, and the energy I put into them saves valuable lifetime for the people who use the Toolbox. And the universe will always remember that.

Our time is beyond price. Akyao Toolbox is meant to help you save that precious time. Even in the future, many small tasks will not be handled reliably and reproducibly by AI. They are commercially too insignificant for AI projects to justify building and maintaining models for them. Akyao Toolbox aims to fill precisely this gap—and to do much more besides.

Tell me which tools could take care of these tedious “in-between tasks” for you and make your digital everyday life easier. If it is technically possible, I will build them for you with the aim of giving you more time for creative and fulfilling projects.

I would be delighted if you supported me in this project, because I need to feel that I have put my mind to something meaningful. My dream is a small house by the sea, with a study from which I can look directly out over the water beyond my monitors. If I can also see mountains on the other side, then my soul will have found its home.