I’ve been building Appointlet since 2012. I write code most days. I live inside the tech world, and even from where I sit, the AI conversation is exhausting.
Every week there’s a new headline. AI wrote a novel. AI passed the bar exam. AI is coming for your job. AI is boiling the oceans. If you’re someone who spends your day cutting hair, adjusting spines, fixing transmissions, or tutoring kids through algebra, I imagine this lands differently for you than it does for the people posting about it on LinkedIn. You’re not sitting at a desk exploring new tools. You’re booked until six and trying to eat lunch between appointments.
And the internet is telling you that on top of all of that, you need to figure out AI.
I want to talk about that for a minute. Not about what AI can do (you can Google that), but about the weight of it. The guilt some people feel for using it, the anxiety of not using it, and the low-grade dread of not understanding something that everyone else seems to have figured out.
I think that layer is what’s actually making this hard for people, and almost nobody in tech is willing to talk about it honestly.
The skepticism makes sense
Most of the people I talk to who are skeptical of AI aren’t uninformed. They’re usually the ones who’ve been burned by tech promises before. So when the next big thing shows up and everyone says you need to pay attention, the natural response is exhaustion. You’ve been here before.
But there’s something deeper going on with AI that I think is different from those past cycles, and it’s worth being honest about it.
A lot of the skepticism isn’t just “here we go again.” There’s a genuine moral and emotional weight as well.
Many of the people I’ve talked to feel guilty for using AI because they worry it’s taking someone else’s job. They feel uneasy because they’ve heard it hallucinates and they don’t know what that means but it sounds bad. They’ve read that training these models uses enormous amounts of energy and water, and they care about that. These are real concerns and they come from a good place.
What I’ve noticed, though, and I say this as someone who thinks about this stuff probably more than I should, is that sometimes those real concerns become a wall. Not intentionally, but because sitting with the discomfort of not understanding something powerful is genuinely hard. It’s easier to find a reason to close the door than to stand in the doorway feeling uncertain.
There are entire communities online that spend all their time cataloging every time AI gets something wrong. And AI does get things wrong. That is definitely true. But when that becomes the only thing you engage with, it starts to function less like healthy skepticism and more like a way to avoid looking at something that feels threatening.
I’m not saying that to judge anyone. I think it’s one of the most human responses possible. When something feels like it might change the ground under your feet, finding reasons to dismiss it is a form of self-protection.
The problem is that closing the door doesn’t make the thing behind it less scary. It just means you’re working with your imagination instead of information. And your imagination is almost always worse than the reality. That’s why I think the most useful thing I can do here isn’t to convince you that AI is good or bad, it’s just to explain what it actually is.
What this thing actually is
When people say “AI” right now, they’re mostly talking about large language models. That sounds technical, but the concept is simpler than the name suggests.
These are programs that have processed an enormous amount of text. including books, articles, websites, and conversations, and learned patterns in how language works. When you ask one a question, it’s not thinking. It’s not reasoning the way you or I would. It’s generating a response based on patterns it’s seen before, one word at a time, predicting what word is most likely to come next.
That’s it. That’s the core of it.
And once you understand that, some of the scarier narratives start to feel more manageable.
AI hallucinations, for example, that’s the term for when AI confidently states something that isn’t true. That sounds terrifying if you think of AI as something that “knows” things. But once you understand that it’s a pattern-matching tool generating probable sequences of words, it makes more sense. It’s not lying. It doesn’t know what true is. It’s producing language that looks right based on patterns, and sometimes those patterns lead somewhere wrong.
That’s a real limitation worth understanding, and it’s also a much less scary thing than a machine that lies to you.
The job displacement fear makes more sense in context too. AI is very good at tasks that involve processing language, like drafting, summarizing, answering routine questions, sorting through information, and coding.
It’s not good at the things that make your work yours: the judgment call when something doesn’t look right, the relationship with a client who’s been coming to you for years, the expertise that only comes from doing the actual work. The jobs most exposed to AI are the ones that were mostly language processing to begin with. If your work involves your hands, your presence, your expertise, and your relationships, you’re in a fundamentally different position than the headlines suggest.
And the environmental concern is real and worth caring about. Running large AI models does require resources. But the picture is more nuanced than the worst headlines. The efficiency of these models is improving quickly, and the energy conversation around AI isn’t that different from the one we had about cloud computing a decade ago, or streaming before that. It’s worth paying attention to, but I personally don’t think it’s a reason to disengage from understanding the technology entirely.
I’m not trying to wave away any of these worries. I’m trying to do what I wish more people in tech would do, which is give you enough context to evaluate them for yourself instead of either panicking or pretending they don’t exist.
You get to go at your own pace
If you’ve read this far and you’re feeling even slightly less apprehensive than when you started, that’s enough. You don’t need to do anything with this information today.
There is no urgency here. Your clients aren’t going to leave because your competitor started using ChatGPT. The value of your business is still in your hands, in your expertise, and in the trust you’ve built with the people who come back to you week after week.
I felt the pressure too, honestly. There was a stretch where it seemed like every software company was racing to bolt AI onto their product just to say they had it. We thought about doing the same thing at Appointlet, and I made the decision to slow down instead.
I’d rather build something that actually helps people than chase a trend because the industry is telling me I should. Are we exploring AI additions? Of course. But we’re doing so thoughtfully, not because we feel like we have to do it.
If you’re curious, try something small when it feels right. Ask ChatGPT a question. See what it says. You’ll probably find it’s less magical than you expected. It’s just a tool, and like any tool, it’s useful for some things and not for others.
And if you’re not curious yet, that’s fine too. Being thoughtful about what you let into your business is not the same as falling behind. It’s just good judgment.
Where I stand
I don’t know what the future of AI looks like. I’m the founder of a scheduling tool, not an oracle. But I do know this: whatever is coming, understanding it is always going to serve you better than avoiding it. And you don’t have to understand it all at once, or alone.
We do office hours on Wednesdays at 1:30 PM EST where nothing is off-limits. There’s no agenda or pitching, it’s just a conversation about whatever’s on your mind, including AI, scheduling, and running a small business in a world that keeps telling you to move faster. You’re welcome anytime.
— Jared
