incolumitas.com – The Rise of AI and Its Implications for Entrepreneurs
incolumitas.com
Here I am going to write down how recent advances in AI influence the creation of new startup ideas.
touch grass once in a while
This blog post is written by me, Nikolai Tschacher, in August 2026 completely alone.<br>I will not even use AI to grammar check or to improve my non mother tongue English.<br>Spell check is being done completely manually,<br>risking that my readers will feel like Batrick Bateman during the business card scene in the movie American Psycho.
On a more brigth side, writing something slithly wrong gives us humans a fuzzy warm feeling and<br>let's us relate more compared to reading professional and "just too good" AI ramblings.
Introduction
When I started working on my business ipapi.is, I did everything on my own:<br>I programmed ipapi.is from scratch without the help of any LLM or AI tools.<br>I guess I started slowly somewhere around 2020 or 2021 with the first ingredients that would later become the IP API<br>that I have now.
ipapi.is works quite fine and it gives me immense freedom, financially and also time wise. I got lucky here, but I also worked<br>extremely hard on it. To some extent it's also a copy of ipinfo.io, and Ben Dowling seems to be the one that came up with the concept of<br>putting IP address meta data into a simple JSON API. So thanks to him as well.
But I digress.
I first started using ChatGPT around November 2022 and even back then it truly shocked me. I first realized that<br>this chatbot is not a stupid thing such as Eliza. When prompted with inputs such as "Please write me a funny short poem in Jambus style about a fat cat from the canary islands that struggles to catch a fish" the<br>current chatgpt gives me an extremely funny short poem:
Upon the rocks he waits all day,<br>A chubby cat beside the bay.<br>He sees a fish and strikes with pride—<br>Then belly-flops into the tide.
The fish swims off; the cat looks grim,<br>For fishing clearly isn’t him.<br>He shakes his paws and starts to wish<br>That someone served him canned tuna fish.
Note: That above poem is the only AI generated content in this blog post, I swear!
Even though the above poem is from now (August 2026), back in November 2022 AI could create such amazing things.<br>And I assume heavily that the above poem is unique .<br>It has never been written before, it is not stolen from somewhere and it is not a copy of something.<br>I find the poem to be just very funny and also extremely creative.<br>So even back then, I thought if AI can create such things, I don't care if haters call it a stochastic parrot or<br>simply a stupid model that predicts each new token based on probabilities.
And ever since ChatGPT 3.5 was released in late 2022, AI slowly but steadily improved.<br>I know this since I am a heavy user of AI since then. First I used AI code a little, but it was often low quality and unreliable.<br>Then it improved more and more and I could use partial results when I prompted accurately.
For programming, a pivotal point was reached for me in around November 2025 with the release of Opus 4.5. That model was just soo good that I did not have to<br>check the AI generated code anymore.<br>I could fully trust it. My work was now promting instead of writing code on my own.<br>And I would state that with models such as Fable and also from Opus 4.8 onwards,<br>AI is now simply better than almost all programmers and software engineers.<br>The best models nowadays are probably better than 98% of all professional software engineers and they are much faster as well.
Of course I still need to now exactly what I want from those powerful coding models.<br>I need to also have something to work on. Those models are not truly smart and autonomous right now.<br>They are more extremely powerful tools. For example I can improve my business ipapi.is in a way that I only could have done so in 2021 with like 5 employees.<br>I know my codebase well and I can delegate tasks efficiently to advanced AI models,<br>then I check or test their work and I troubleshoot if necessary.
So currently in August 2026, software engineers are way more efficient and way better than ever before.<br>But that doesn't make senior engineers redundant, it makes them way more powerful.
And I honestly think that the current state - where great engineers become godlike - will likely continue for a couple of years. How long I don't know.
I don't know what is the next step. I mean how much better can the models realistically become for coding.<br>They are already better than most human engineers. The next evolution would probably be<br>RSI (recursive self improvement) and then AGI or something like that.<br>I have no clue, I can only talk from my experience.
A concrete Example from my own business
For instance a couple of weeks ago, I let Claude Fable 5 rewrite my software that is running the API behind ipapi.is from Node.JS to the Go programming language.
I have never in my life used Go for programming.
After like 2 hours of letting Cursor work...