From Yahoo Pool Forums to AI: The Power Grab Never Really Ended

I was 14 when I figured out that code was power.

It was 2004. I was writing VB6 bots for Yahoo Pool — rating boosters, chat spammers, proxy rotators, mass password changers, exploits I probably shouldn’t list out even now. I cranked out over 200 tools for 15 different forums. I never owned one. I didn’t need to. If you were the top dawg pumping out custom tools, the forum owners came to you. Traffic followed the tools. Reputation followed the traffic. Power followed the reputation.

That was the whole game. Whoever had the best automation had the best community. Whoever had the best community ran the scene.

I heard stories about what some people did with my tools. Some of it I can’t put online — privacy laws, and honestly just respect for the fact that some of it was genuinely bad. That part of it turned me off after a few years. I pivoted the same skills into writing essays and burning through homework in an afternoon, which freed me up to go skate for hours with my friends. Those were good years. Nobody was doing power grabs in high school. You just had to show up and not be a jerk.

Then you get older. Responsibility kicks in. You start watching the news. And the pattern I’d seen in a dumb little pool forum turns out to be the pattern running everything.

The power grab just scales up

College applications decide which jobs you’re “worthy” of, so people start doing whatever it takes to get into the right ones. People get stepped on. Reputations get damaged. Friendships crumble. Rumors get weaponized. Sometimes people get hurt.

Zoom out another level and nations are doing the same thing to each other over natural resources. Same playbook as a Yahoo forum war, just with actual consequences. The tools change. The hunger doesn’t.

I’m not saying that to sound cynical. I’m saying it because once you see the pattern, you stop being surprised by any of it — and you start thinking hard about where you stand in it.

AI is the biggest power shift I’ve seen in my lifetime

I’ve been coding for 20+ years. PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, Python, C#, VBA, Java, Bash, Arduino — I’ve built in all of them, mostly for shits and giggles, not for money. I was a damn good coder before AI. I’m saying that plainly because I want the next part to land:

AI finishes six-month projects in ten hours. And it does them better than the six-month version would’ve been.

That’s not hype. That’s me, on a Claude Max subscription, two usage cycles, watching a production system come together in the time it takes to cook dinner. #CodeEverywhere is my motto and my family hates it because I’m prompting while I’m cooking, prompting while I’m walking, prompting at 3am.

The capability that actually gets me is this: AI can write code and feed that code back into its own learning loop with the flick of a switch. That’s not a tool anymore. That’s something else.

And it’s colliding with the same power dynamics that have always existed, just with way more leverage. Corporations want the tech for automation, for weapons, for replacing workers, and they’re pretty open about not caring who gets hurt in the process. Governments want it for control. Both sides are racing, and neither is slowing down for a conversation about what any of it should look like.

I’m not going to pretend I know where the line is. I don’t. But I’ve watched small communities get reshaped by whoever had the best automation, and I’ve watched industries get reshaped by whoever had the best capital. Now I’m watching entire economies get reshaped by whoever has the best models. Same pattern, bigger stakes.

Fighting it is dumb. Mastering it is everything.

Here’s where my fight-or-flight brain actually earns its keep.

I watched my own automation services get undercut in real time. Stuff I used to charge real money for, AI now whips up in an afternoon. That should have been a crisis. Instead it became the unlock. Because instead of being the guy who writes the automation, I became the guy who designs the system the automation runs inside — and then uses AI to build it ten times faster than I ever could alone.

That’s the move. That’s the only move.

If you’re a small business owner reading this: the same thing is coming for whatever you do, in some form. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not even in the way you expect. But pretending it isn’t is how you get flattened. The business owners who win the next decade aren’t the ones who fight AI or the ones who blindly hand everything over to it. They’re the ones who weave it into their daily operations until it’s load-bearing — while they still have the leverage to decide how it gets woven in.

Because the window for that decision is closing. When infrastructure gets controlled by whoever has the most scale, individual choice goes out the window. That’s true of every prior power shift, and it’ll be true of this one. Get your hands on the tool now, while the tool is still yours to use.

What I actually believe, after all of it

I grew up in the middle of a scene where power meant automation and automation meant power. I watched people misuse that. I watched it turn friends into strangers. I stepped away and used the same skills to buy myself more time to go skate.

Twenty years later, the tool is a thousand times more powerful, the stakes are a thousand times higher, and the question is exactly the same: what are you going to do with it?

I’m using mine to help small businesses — the ones who never had budget for enterprise software, the ones who’ve been told “that’s just how it is” their whole careers — get production-grade systems for the price of a nice dinner. Not because it’s charity. Because I genuinely believe the only counterweight to centralized power is decentralized capability. The more small operators can automate, compete, and move faster, the less power the consolidators end up with.

That’s the version of this future I want to live in. And I’m building toward it, one system at a time, from Sunnyvale, usually around 3am, usually with a half-eaten plate of whatever I cooked while I was prompting.

If you run a small business and you’ve been feeling the ground shift under you — you’re not wrong. It is shifting. Let’s talk about what weaving AI into your operation actually looks like, before the decision gets made for you.

— Rishi