The amateur radio community has some of the most talented software developers I've ever encountered. Individual hams — working alone, in their spare time, for free — have built the entire digital voice ecosystem that thousands of us rely on every day. Hotspot dashboards. Digital voice protocols. Multiprotocol reflectors. Transcoders. Cross-mode gateways. Voice codecs. Modems. Software-defined radio applications.
These aren't weekend toys. These are production-grade, open-source software projects used by thousands of hams around the globe, running 24/7 on repeaters and hotspots and reflectors on every continent. And most of them were built by one person, or maybe two, writing code after work and on weekends because they saw a problem and decided to solve it.
But this isn't just about software developers. The ham radio community is full of creators of every kind — antenna designers running simulations and testing prototypes in their backyards, technical writers producing manuals and guides, hardware builders designing circuit boards and 3D-printed enclosures, educators creating training materials and videos. And beyond ham radio, the same story plays out everywhere: scientists analyzing data, writers crafting articles, engineers designing systems, teachers building lesson plans, small business owners wearing every hat at once. Talented people, working hard, doing exceptional work — often alone.
That kind of talent is rare. And it deserves every advantage available.
The commercial software industry has embraced AI as a development tool — not reluctantly, but aggressively. Companies are buying their engineers AI subscriptions because the results speak for themselves.
As of 2025, 82% of professional developers use AI coding tools weekly. Google reports that 25% of its code is now AI-assisted and that engineering velocity has increased 10% as a result. Companies routinely spend $100 to $200 per month per engineer on tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 75% of enterprise software engineers will use AI code assistants as a standard part of their workflow.
These aren't companies replacing their engineers. These are companies making their engineers more powerful. The best developers in the world — people at Google, Microsoft, Atlassian, and hundreds of startups — are using AI every day. Not because they can't code without it, but because they can code better with it.
AI doesn't do your work for you. What it does is remove the friction that slows you down.
For a software developer, you can feed your existing codebase to an AI and ask it to find inefficiencies you haven't noticed. It can spot patterns, suggest optimizations, and identify potential bugs — not because it's smarter than you, but because it can analyze thousands of lines of code in seconds without getting tired or distracted. It can generate documentation from your code — the task every developer hates and every user wishes you'd done. It can write unit tests. It can prototype a new feature in hours that would have taken you a weekend.
For an antenna designer, AI can analyze simulation data, compare radiation patterns, and suggest geometry modifications you might not have considered. For a technical writer, it can draft documentation in a fraction of the time, letting you focus on accuracy and clarity rather than starting from a blank page. For a scientist, it can process datasets and surface correlations buried in noise. For a teacher, it can generate lesson plans, quizzes, and explanations tailored to different skill levels.
For anyone who creates anything — a baker experimenting with recipes, an engineer designing a circuit, a writer crafting an article, a small business owner building a website — AI serves the same function: it handles the routine work so you can focus on the creative work that only you can do.
Engineers have reported feeding their existing software to AI and having it suggest improvements they hadn't considered — not replacing their vision, but extending it. The work is still yours. The expertise is still yours. The decisions are still yours. AI just helps you execute faster and catch things you might have missed.
The ham radio open-source community has a problem that the commercial world doesn't: there's no budget. There's no team of 50 engineers. There's no QA department. There's no technical writer. There's usually just one person doing everything — writing the code, fixing the bugs, answering the support questions, updating the documentation, and maintaining the servers — all while holding down a day job.
AI doesn't replace any of that dedication. But it can make that one person as productive as three or four. It can take the tedious parts off your plate so you can focus on the creative parts — the architecture, the features, the ideas that only you can have. It can help you ship faster, document better, and spend less time debugging and more time innovating.
And for projects that are maintained by a single developer, AI provides something else that's hard to find: a second pair of eyes. Not a collaborator who argues about design philosophy, but a tool that reviews your code objectively and says "have you considered this edge case?" or "this function could be simplified" or "here's a more efficient way to handle that data structure."
I want to be clear about something: I'm not a software engineer. I'm a ham, a maker, and I love experimenting with digital voice modes. I don't write the kind of code that runs reflectors and modems and protocol stacks. I'm a user of the brilliant software that this community creates.
But AI has already transformed what I can accomplish as a non-engineer. It helps me configure systems I wouldn't have understood on my own. It helps me troubleshoot problems. It helps me build things I couldn't have built alone. If AI can do that for someone like me, imagine what it could do for the people who actually write the code.
I know there's skepticism about AI — in the ham community and everywhere else. Some say it will make people dumber. I've heard that feedback firsthand. And I understand the concern. But I think it has the argument exactly backwards.
A calculator didn't make mathematicians dumber — it freed them to work on harder problems. CAD software didn't make architects dumber — it let them design buildings that couldn't exist on a drafting table. AI doesn't make developers dumber. It makes good developers faster. The knowledge is still in your head. The design decisions are still yours. AI can't architect a reflector system if you don't understand digital voice protocols. It can't design an antenna if you don't understand RF propagation. You still have to know enough to evaluate what AI gives you. If you can't read the code, you can't use the code. AI rewards expertise — it doesn't replace it.
Here's how I think about it. Picture a massive container ship approaching the Golden Gate — right here in the heart of Silicon Valley, the tech capital of the world. That ship has every piece of modern technology on board: GPS, radar, AIS, electronic charts, automated systems. It has all the power and capability to make the transit. But it doesn't come through the Golden Gate without a harbor pilot.
The harbor pilot knows the currents, the fog patterns, the traffic lanes, the tidal flows, the shallow spots near Alcatraz. The pilot has spent years learning that specific waterway. The ship is the tool. The pilot is the expertise. Neither one works without the other.
And here's the key: the captain isn't threatened by the pilot. The captain has years of experience, commands the entire vessel, but welcomes the pilot aboard because the pilot makes the transit safer and better. They work together. The captain doesn't feel diminished. The ship's technology doesn't replace the pilot's knowledge. Together they bring that ship safely under the Golden Gate, past Alcatraz, through the slot, and into the Port of Oakland.
AI is the ship. You're the harbor pilot. The human element can never be taken out of the equation.
There's another way to think about this. Cars used to be handmade — one at a time, by master craftsmen, affordable only to the wealthy. Then Henry Ford introduced the assembly line. Cars went from being built by the dozens to being produced by the hundreds of thousands. And the assembly line didn't employ fewer people — it employed more. It created an entire workforce, an entire middle class, and put automobiles in the driveways of families who never could have afforded a handmade car.
But the assembly line itself had to be created, built, analyzed, maintained, and improved. New specialized jobs were born that didn't exist before — industrial engineers, tool and die makers, quality control inspectors, logistics coordinators, maintenance technicians. The assembly line didn't just change how cars were made. It created entirely new careers.
AI will do the same thing. We don't yet know all the jobs AI will create, but throughout history, every major technology shift has followed the same pattern. Yes, some jobs became obsolete. But others were created in their place — often more of them, often better ones. People retrained. Industries transformed. Society moved forward.
I'm 63 years old. I grew up in a world dominated by General Electric, Kodak, AT&T — Ma Bell — and dozens of other companies that seemed permanent, indestructible, woven into the fabric of American life. It would never have occurred to me as a young person that these giants would be gone or unrecognizable in my lifetime. But they are. Kodak invented the digital camera and then was destroyed by it. AT&T was broken up and rebuilt into something entirely different. GE was dismantled and sold off in pieces. The world I grew up in doesn't exist anymore.
That's not a tragedy. That's how progress works. The people who adapted thrived. The people who refused to see the change coming got left behind. AI is the next wave, and it's already here. The question isn't whether it will change how we work and create — it already has. The question is whether we'll use it, or watch from the sideline while others do.
The assembly line didn't replace the skill of building a car. It made that skill accessible to more people and amplified what a single factory could produce. AI does the same thing for creators. It doesn't replace the developer who writes a digital voice protocol or the engineer who designs an antenna. It lets them produce more, reach more people, and spend their time on the work that requires human insight instead of the repetitive tasks that slow them down. And just like the assembly line opened up the automobile to a wider world, AI opens up the ability to create — software, documentation, designs, solutions — to people who have the ideas but not the resources of a large team.
The developers who built our digital voice infrastructure are brilliant. The antenna designers, the technical writers, the hardware builders, the educators — they're all brilliant. They've proven it. They created things that changed how we communicate, how we learn, how we work — and many of them did it alone, on their own time, for the love of it. AI doesn't diminish that accomplishment — it amplifies what comes next.
The professional world figured this out already. The best engineers, the best scientists, the best writers in the world aren't threatened by AI — they're using it. They're more productive, they're doing better work, and they're solving harder problems because they have a tool that handles the routine so they can focus on the creative.
The amateur radio community has always been about experimentation, about trying new things, about pushing the boundaries of what's possible with limited resources. That spirit applies to every creator, every builder, every maker in every field. AI is exactly that kind of tool. It's sitting there, ready to help, and it costs less than a good soldering station.
To every developer, every designer, every writer, every builder, every creator who has made something the rest of us depend on: thank you. And please — give AI a look. Not to replace what you've built, but to help you build what comes next.
No matter what you do — write code, design antennas, teach, build, create — learn to use AI to help you do what you do better. AI is a tool, and those who learn how to use it effectively will do what they already do now better, and will continue to do so in the future. The ones who don't will be watching from the sideline.
Think about Edwin Howard Armstrong. Working largely alone in his lab, he invented the regenerative circuit, the superheterodyne receiver, and frequency modulation — FM radio. Three inventions that transformed the entire world of communications. One engineer, working solo, changed everything. Now imagine if Armstrong had AI as a tool in his lab. Imagine what he could have done with a tireless assistant that could run simulations, analyze circuits, test variables, and crunch data while he focused on the creative leaps that only a human mind can make. Armstrong didn't need AI to be brilliant — but AI would have made his brilliance go further, faster.
The amateur radio community is full of Armstrongs — people working alone, building things that change how we communicate. AI won't replace that kind of genius. But it might just help the next Armstrong get there sooner.
73,
Chris N6JET