Trying something new to me. I’ve been really interested in AI recently and when my friend, Rich, approached me about sharing his thoughts about AI I jumped at the chance. Richard Crane and I chatted for a while about artificial intelligence. What follows is a transcript of that conversation.
Introduction
Alfred Thompson:
Welcome, everyone. Today I’m joined by Richard Crane, Founder, CTO, and Chief AI Officer of MILL5. Richard and I go way back—we’ve known each other since 2003 when we were colleagues at Microsoft.
While Richard has been deeply embedded in the AI space for over a decade, the rest of the world is just now catching up to the shift he has been helping to lead—moving AI from a simple developer tool to a complete reimagining of how we build and solve problems.
I’ve invited him here to discuss the new reality for developers, the changing landscape of computer science education, and how experienced engineers are evolving into AI orchestrators.
Richard, thanks for joining me.
Background and Relationship
Richard Crane: Alfred, no problem. I’ve been looking forward to this. You and I go way back—from our time at Microsoft. And later on, you taught computer science in high school, and it just so happens you taught both my kids. So this is an amazing opportunity for us. Thank you.
Alfred Thompson: You’re very welcome.
Balancing Roles: Building and Documenting AI
Alfred Thompson: You are the Founder, CTO, and Chief AI Officer of MILL5—and also the host of the Inventing Fire with AI podcast. How do these roles—building the technology and documenting its evolution—inform each other?
Richard Crane: That’s a great question. Let me start by saying we formed MILL5 about ten years ago. At the time, I actually held every title—CEO, CFO, CTO. There was no “Chief AI Officer” title back then, but we were already doing AI.
My business partner, Sri Bhupathi, has been doing incredible work in AI for years. And AI encompasses far more than what people see today with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok. It includes natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning, and many other technologies—and we’ve been working across all of them for a long time.
To your question—how do building and documenting inform each other? I’ve always considered myself a doer. I learn best by doing. Talking about what I’ve built helps me articulate and reinforce what I’ve learned.
AI is evolving so rapidly—there’s something new every day. Right now, I’m deeply focused on knowledge distillation and trying to reach a very high level of expertise in that area.
So the process goes hand in hand:
- Building helps us serve our customers at MILL5
- Documenting helps share that knowledge with the broader community
Early AI Adoption and the “Light Bulb” Moment
Alfred Thompson: You’ve been working with AI for over 10 years—long before the current hype cycle. What was the moment when you realized AI wasn’t just another tool, but a fundamental shift in how we build?
Richard Crane: A few things come to mind. First, we’ve been doing AI since day one at MILL5. One thing about our team is that we constantly push ourselves to the cutting edge. We always aim to understand what’s coming before everyone else.
If you go back 10 years, people might say, “You weren’t doing AI back then.” But we absolutely were. In fact, one of our AI solutions for Olympus was featured in a Microsoft Build keynote in 2019.
I remember sitting in the audience while it was being presented, and suddenly my phone started blowing up—friends and colleagues asking, “Is that you guys?” And I said, “Yes, that’s us.”
As for the “light bulb” moment—it wasn’t a single instant. It was a series of realizations.
One key moment was in January 2019 during our global company meeting. At that time, we had grown from two people in a room to a company operating in seven countries.
I pulled up our company-wide slide deck and made a very clear statement:
“Everyone in the company needs to know AI. Period.”
Since then, AI has been a core part of every company discussion, multiple times a year.
So in 2019 I knew it, but there are many more light bulb moments, right? And I'll just give you one more and three years ago or 2 1/2 almost three years ago when people were like, I can use ChatGPT or I could do this and they were they're like maybe I could use it for coding. And there were some aspects of coding where it could generate code, I can honestly say the light bulb moment, a major light bulb moment for me, was in January of this year where I'm a seasoned software engineer, one that I would consider. Yeah, I try to be humble, but I'm I feel like I'm top 1% on the planet. That's what people keep telling me. And in January of this year, I'm able to build full-fledged systems by myself.
And I want to enable that for every single developer I have on my team. And so that's a light bulb moment as well where things have shifted big time and they keep shifting. I expect another shift sometime over the summer and another shift sometime in October, November time frame. So we're going to see a lot more light bulb moments.
AI Creativity and Human Advantage
Richard Crane: One interesting observation from my current work: I’m building different applications—like a financial operations cost analyzer for the cloud—and while they are very different, they often end up looking surprisingly similar in style and structure.
When I want creativity, I’ll tell the AI: “Go wild. Be creative.” But often, it doesn’t vary much.
So how do I get variation? I switch models. I might move from Claude to ChatGPT, or to Gemini, or another tool entirely.
That’s how I introduce diversity into the output.
At the end of the day, though, I still believe humans have the edge in creativity—by a wide margin.
Alfred Thompson So you are incredibly productive using AI. How much of that is due to your prior experience in software development? Can someone without a solid technical foundation ever truly close the gap, or does technical debt? Eventually catch up with them.
Rich Crane - This one is so hard for me to even talk about. I get parents call me up who whose kids are in computer science in school now or just graduated and they said Is my child not going to have a job?
And about two years ago, I would say as long as they learn AI, they're going to be fine.
These days I don't know if that's the case. In fact, I don't think it is. I hired 2 interns last, not this past January, but the January before, and I set them loose. I had a laundry list of my projects that I always wanted to do and never got done.
And I set them loose on one of them. And I remember I asked them to do something. I mentored them. I told them certain things. I educated them and I said, hey, your programmers, they were from a local university. I won't say which one.
But they I set them loose to develop it as well as gave them access to every AI I had and I have access to all of them and three weeks later.
They sort of got something done. It was good, but not great, and it didn't work exactly the way I wanted. I would probably use the word janky. That's a fun term that I hear sometimes in software development.
And I was like, I couldn't ship it, right? In fact, I in fact, I don't think I can really fully use it. And I let them do their thing.
But then I took those same requirements and then I went out AI with it.
I got it done in two hours.
So 2 interns, 3 weeks.
It didn't meet the need, didn't get exactly what I wanted. But in two hours, because I am somebody that knows what they're doing, I have 30 plus years of software experience in startups, Microsoft, my own companies because I have that experience.
I can direct AI the way I want. And I get it done, right? I'm working on OS right now that would have taken two years and I'm getting them done in seven days or less.
Right, so the answer is it's really important to have prior experience, right? The the senior principal architects and developers. In fact, Scott Hanselman was. I just saw an episode with him. You remember Scott, right?
Alfred Thompson Oh, yeah.
Rich Crane So Scott just said that he's tired. Why? Because he has that young energy to go develop and do things, but he's not the same young guy he was trying to take on the world with software development. He's, but he has this fuel to do more because of AI. But his physical ability and his age and his, he's a fit guy, don't get me wrong. But still he's not the same young guy.
It's a weird time, and I do agree that prior experience is a big thing. It's a it's an important thing, so.
Alfred Thompson - So if the if the traditional entry-level programming job is drying up, as it seems to be, how would a student today prove their value? Should they still be doing like leet code? Should they be focused on building autonomous AI agents?
Rich Crane - You got to put yourself out there, right? You got to put yourself out there, right?
Alfred Thompson - What should they be doing?
Rich Crane - I think there's value in learning everything and anything with software development. Imagine if you had a Agentex system. Like right now I have Openclaw and I have 7 agents running on the thing. I have a scout that's looking for ideas. I have an assistant that's helping me coordinate those ideas. I have a developer and an architect agent, and those two are responsible for building the plan, building the spec, and then implementing it, right? There's a couple others, but those things are not going to be any good if you, the person, are able to express things.
In fact, I had this conversation last night at a local restaurant with a guy and he was like, oh, you don't need to know anything anymore. And I'm like, that's not true.
I said you can express something and yes, you will get something out of it will be exactly what you want. Will it perform? Will it scale? Will it function correctly?
Will there be little things here and there? Anybody I know can vibe code an app these days and get it the look and feel down. But when I look at it, I'm like, oh, what did AI just do? There's something wrong right there. And then I ask AI, I said, what's going on there? There's some problem there. And it's like, oh, I'm doing this. And usually my response is, why the heck are you doing that, right?
And I said, but then here's the follow on. Why are you not doing this?
And the thing I love about it, AI says you're absolutely right. I should be doing that. And I sit back and I just like, yeah, I know I'm right. But that's the problem. People don't know what they don't know. And that's a that's a big gap.
AI and CS Education
Alfred Thompson - OK, so my focus has been on CS education. What's the new math of computer science? Do we still need to teach manual memory management and data structures if an A I can handle them in seconds?
Rich Crane - I think it's needed. It's not that they can't handle them in seconds, it's that. And this, right? There's one data structure and another data structure. Like let's take an array versus a linked list, right? Every time you have to allocate a new slot in array, you have to destroy the array, recreate another one copy from the original array into the new one. it's from a memory management perspective and a performance perspective. It's a nightmare. What you don't want is a I just to say, hey, I think I should use an array for everything. Versus, say, some other data structure like a hash table or a link list or dictionary or something, right? And AI knows about all those things. But quite frankly, I feel like AI sometimes is the junior engineer, very capable junior engineer, meaning it knows everything, but it doesn't know exactly what it should do.
Alfred Thompson - At this point, are we teaching students how to be pilots of these AIs, or can we still be teaching them how to build the engine? Which skill is more valuable in 2026?
Rich Crane - Well, in 2026, if how to build the engine, you're gonna, you're gonna do extremely well, right? The challenge is I think. If how to pilot AI systems in the future, that's where it's going to go. We're not going to get there this year or next year as the like the main focus.
Unfortunately, the problem is building the engine is going to be a lost knowledge, right? People are not going to know how to do those things, and unfortunately this happens with a lot of different industries. I'm trying to think of one where it's like, hey, in this modern age there are things we did 100 years ago that we don't do today, and writing code is one of them, right? In 100 years we will absolutely not be writing code, but with AI being so fast.
And the evolution and innovation around it, it's just a matter of time. The question is how long.
Yeah, well, I know your your passion for education. you've been doing technology and education for so long, right?
Alfred Thompson - Yeah, I have. And that's kind of where my passion is right now. And one of the things I've always pushed is I've always told students that I want them to be creative. A teacher that I really respect once said that if you get 23 student projects that all look alike, you gave them a recipe. you didn't give them a project. You didn't. You didn't get what you really wanted to get out of it. You really want to see 23 projects that all look different.
Rich Crane - That's true. In fact, I always say that when you give people a task in software engineering, they in fact, what? This is a great thing,.
If you think about it with AI, you give a task to a bunch of your employees, they say go build this. You're going to get all different answers. Why? Because there's hundreds of ways to do that same task in software engineering. Will the AI come up with 500 ways?
A Look Into The Future
Alfred Thompson - All right, so let's look a little bit into the future. We are moving past the chatting with the box. In five years, will the title software engineer even exist or will we all be product architects?
Rich Crane - I think the software engineer will exist. I think it will be there for those engineers that take learning as an art, as a craftsmanship, right? That likes to learn everything there is. But they'll be doing so much more. we used to see like developers and engineers, they'll focus on one thing. In fact, we were talking about this on a team I'm working on right now. We're doing all Agentex development just across the board. In a production product, no less like like a crazy production product. It's like, hey, one of the guys has a specialty in UI. Guess what? When I when I brought it on the project, I was like, you're no longer just the UI guy, you're also the DevOps guy and the database guy and the mobile app development guy, right? And the front end web guy, right? And the API guy, right?
Of course you're probably going to specialize in certain areas, but you're doing everything. So I think what's going to be interesting is yes, the word software engineer is going to stay around, but those software engineers that remain. Are going to be doing everything now product architects? Absolutely. In fact, the same restaurant I was at last night, I was sitting at the bar with one of my employees and he's one of my top guys. And I had my laptop with me and I opened up the laptop and we were talking about an accelerator that we were building for some of our customers and we were of course Vibe coding it and everything else.
And we were looking at it and. It's a pretty extensive accelerator tool, right? It's not going to be a product of ours, it's more to help our customers. And my developer looked or my, engineer developer employee looked at me and said how much line, how many lines of code did you write on this? I said zero, right? And we were talking about a feature that my business partner wanted in in this accelerator. And I said, hey, here's this product spec that I created for this feature. I just pasted the spec in. I pasted an image right? I said I want it to look like this and I just drew it right? So I pasted this image, pasted this spec. It got it done in like 8 minutes.
And then my engineer was like, whoa. I was like, yeah, he goes, well, I don't like this, right? And he goes, what if we had this? And there was a graph. It was a dynamic graph. And you probably know this, right? Developing graphs. It's not easy and it's sometimes suck and but AI just did it and generated it. It was very cool from the first moment we saw it, but we made it cooler. We didn't write a line of code. All we expressed was Can you do this? We would like this, right? We think this would be cool. And it, what it says? It's very, I forget the term. What was it? Sycophantic, right? It's very agreeable. It says, well, that's a great idea. I'll get right on it.
And literally 2 minutes later, not even not even 2 minutes. In fact, I think it was like 30 seconds, but I we were at the bar talking, so I don't know if it was like 30 seconds or two minutes, but it was definitely 2 minutes or less. It did it. And we're like, take it back because it wasn't a simple ask, right? And I was just like, wow. So there is going to be a lot of product architects, a lot fewer software engineers, but a lot more capable software engineers, meaning they're going to the knowledge that a software Engineer is gonna have in this next wave is gonna be so much. even with my AI and agentic coding and vibe coding and things like that, there are topics that I know now that I didn't know five years ago.
Alfred Thompson - OK, so one last wrap it up. As models become more capable, what is the one human skill that you believe will remain AI proof?
Rich Crane - Well, we'll have to preface this, so anybody that's creative. Art centric. Anybody that's trade oriented, right? Like the same developer that's sitting next to me who's one of the best developers know he get he will get to the point where he does assembly code and looks at ones and zeros to figure out bugs. And he had to do it because of the one of the projects he's on and he's like, should I just become a plumber?
And I'm like, I don't know. Do you want? I'm thinking he does a lot of really great home, home repairs and do-it-yourself projects and things like that. I'm like, the plumbers are making a lot of money right now. So are the electricians and the construction people and things like that. They're all building AI data centers.
But at the same time, the people that are developing art, painting, music, right? Google released something recently to generate music with AI, and it's good. It's OK.
I don't think it's great, but you can see the clear difference between AI developing that and an actual human being. So I think it's going to allow us to do. Be more creative, more, focus on our art and those type of capabilities. In fact, somebody said a long time ago, I don't want AI to generate an image for me. I wanted to do my dishes, right?
I still think to this day there is a distinct difference between AI doing those type of work, right?
So yeah, no, I'll tell you, it's there's a lot of things to come in and software engineering isn't going away, that's for sure. It's definitely changing though and one of the things I think is kind of interesting is how do you not lose?
I think there's going to be scenarios where others aren't teaching those things anymore and because they don't get taught, we'll eventually lose. So how do you get that?
And I'm going to preface this with one other thing is People worry about like, am I, am I going to lose my job? In fact, I just had that conversation not even an hour ago, right? And it was, it was a role that wasn't technical and that person was like, hey, I might lose my job and I'm like, why?
Right. Somebody, I think it was Matthew Berman, right. He's one of the AI podcast influencers out there. He automated one of his employees tasks. He didn't intend to. He was just trying to automate his business and in doing that he took like 90% of the work that that person was doing away. But what it did is freed that person up to do so many more things. And because that work that he was doing was trivial, menial, minutiae and just tedious. AI could do it faster and better than the human, and now the human could go work on creative stuff and big things and all that stuff. And in the process he's doing 10 times more work than he did before because of AI.
So we're going to see a productivity revolution that is just happening. And it's funny, I was thinking about my employees and I was thinking about me.
I have a company that isn't a bunch of software engineers and things like that. Every person is their own software development team. So I have a company of hundreds of software development teams where one person stood before as a software engineer, their entire team unto themselves, right? And that's the way I look at it..
Closing Remarks
Alfred Thompson - Thank you. Appreciate your time. A lot to digest.
Richard Crane: Alfred, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure.
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