Everyone's talking about AI these days — tools that can write code, generate articles, produce entire songs. It genuinely feels like the future arrived early and nobody quite finished preparing for it. But after months of building CozonPay and working on ArtistBio, I've been sitting with a thought that keeps circling back, uncomfortable enough that I haven't fully shaken it off yet.
Most people, I think, will never build anything that actually lasts in this particular era. Not because they lack access to the tools — everyone has roughly the same tools now, that's the whole point of this moment. It's because most people are missing something underneath the tools that no amount of access fixes.
I've watched friends, and a fair number of people online, jump from one AI tool to the next, generating content and side projects at a pace that looks impressive from the outside. Fast output, constant motion, a new thing announced every week. But very little of it actually sticks around. It chases whatever's trending instead of sitting with a real problem long enough to actually understand it, and you can usually tell the difference within the first thirty seconds of looking at it closely.
I've tried to build differently, though I'll admit I didn't get there immediately or cleanly. While working on CozonPay, I use AI the way I'd use a genuinely sharp collaborator — something that helps me debug faster, or throws out an angle I hadn't considered when I'm stuck. But I'm still the one making the actual calls, still the one pouring in what I actually know about local payment challenges, the specific trust issues people here carry from being burned before, the daily frustrations I've either lived through myself or watched someone else live through in front of me. That texture isn't something a tool can generate on its own, because it was never data to begin with. It was just my life, paying attention.
The same holds for the music, as Owlzila. AI can generate a beat that technically works, sure. It can't generate what it actually felt like growing up in Lagos, or the specific weight of being an independent artist trying to get heard without a label behind you pushing doors open on your behalf. That has to come from somewhere real, or it doesn't land the same way, no matter how technically clean the production is.
I think what actually separates the small number of people who build something meaningful from everyone else chasing the wave comes down to a few things, and I've been trying to hold myself to all of them, imperfectly. First, solving a real problem — not a hypothetical one, not one that sounds good in a pitch, but one I've personally run into, like the genuine difficulty of sending and receiving money simply in Nigeria. Second, keeping an actual personal voice running through the work — my writing, my code, my music, all carrying something specific to me that can't be faked convincingly by anything else, because it's not really about style, it's about having actually lived the thing you're describing. Third, and maybe the least talked about, just consistency and patience. AI makes starting something almost frictionlessly easy now. It does nothing for the harder part — actually finishing, actually iterating past the first rough version, actually showing up on the tenth day when the tenth day feels exactly as unglamorous as the first one did.
I'll be honest that I almost fell into the trap I'm describing here myself. Early on, I leaned on AI to help write blog posts, and it felt genuinely good in the moment — fast output, something to publish, momentum I could point to. But reading those posts back later, they didn't sound like me. Something was missing that I couldn't immediately name, until I realized it was simply soul — the specific, lived-in texture that comes from a sentence that only makes sense because you actually experienced the thing it's describing. So I went back to writing from an honest place, even though it's slower, even though it's harder to sit down and actually think instead of just generating something serviceable and moving on.
If you want to end up in the small group of people who actually build things that matter through all of this, here's what I'd genuinely tell you. Use AI, but don't let it end up using you instead — don't let it become the thing setting your direction while you just react to whatever it hands back. Build in public where people can actually see your real process, not just the polished result. Focus on problems you genuinely, personally care about, not whatever's currently getting attention online. And keep learning the actual fundamentals underneath whatever you're building — the coding, the music theory, the business mechanics — because a tool can accelerate someone who already understands what they're doing, but it can't substitute for that understanding when it's missing entirely.
I'm trying to be the exception here, honestly, by combining what these new tools are actually good for with old-fashioned human effort, the specific kind of resilience building in Nigeria teaches you whether you ask for it or not, and a story that's actually mine. The AI era is exciting, genuinely — I don't think the excitement is misplaced. But I still believe the people who end up mattering through all of this will be the ones who showed up consistently with heart and real persistence, not just the ones who moved fastest out of the gate.
Where do you actually stand on this? Are you using AI in what you're building? And more importantly — how are you making sure you keep your own human touch in it, instead of quietly letting the tool start making the decisions for you? Let's talk about it in the comments.