u/ArtichokeFew6941

​

I built my first business on a Windows 95 machine with a 14,400 baud modem and an Access database.

I spent an entire month hand-coding HTML pages before I realized I actually needed to connect to a database and learn to write software.

So I bought a book. There were no online courses. No YouTube. No Stack Overflow. I taught myself Classic ASP — Microsoft's first web programming language — off a book I read cover to cover. Set up a Windows 95 machine. Installed Personal Web Server. Configured a local DSN connection to an Access database I had no idea how to normalize.

Today we create connection strings like it's nothing.

That one took me two weeks.

Two weeks. 14,400 baud modem. A connection that sounded like two fax machines having an argument. And when those records finally spilled out of the database onto the web page I was reloading, I felt like Tom Hanks in Cast Away the moment he finally made fire. I had punched that enter key thousands of times. Thousands. And when it worked I just sat there staring at the screen.

That's what the beginning of the internet felt like.

AI feels exactly like that right now. That same electricity. That same sense that nobody really knows the rules yet and the people willing to sit there and punch enter a thousand times are going to be the ones who figure it out first.

So I built something. And I'll be honest — the first version was too complicated. I'm an enterprise architect. Complicated is kind of my love language. I kept adding layers because that's what I know how to do.

That version never shipped.

What I ended up building almost felt too simple to show people. You just text it. Like you're sitting in a conference room with your A-Team — your CFO, your CMO, your ops lead, your strategist — and you're just telling them what you need done. Except you don't have a conference room. And you definitely don't have a CFO. You've got your phone and an idea and a business you're trying to figure out.

So you text it. And it gets done.

I've been showing it to people.

Nobody's getting on their phone while I'm talking. Nobody's politely nodding and waiting for me to finish. They're leaning in. They're saying tell me more. I know what it looks like when someone's actually excited versus being nice about it. I've been in enough rooms to know the difference.

Not one person has said no yet.

I don't know if this works. I'm not going to tell you it's guaranteed. But I've been at this long enough to know that when people lean in instead of tune out, you're probably onto something real.

The possibilities feel genuinely endless right now. That's not something I say lightly after thirty years.

I think we're standing at the edge of the next generation of the internet, and almost nobody's saying it out loud.

The line I keep coming back to: Everything you need to do on the internet — done by text. No browser. No login. No tabs. No 300 passwords. Just a thread you're already in.

I've been building software for 30 years, and lately I can't shake a question: why is the browser still the front door to the internet?

Not as a tech complaint — Chrome and Safari are fine engineering. I mean as an interface choice. We've defaulted, for 30 years, to the assumption that "using the internet" means opening a browser, typing a URL, logging in to something, navigating tabs, managing 300 passwords, paying for 12 SaaS subscriptions, and trying to remember where we left off.

That was a reasonable design in 1995. I'm not sure it's a reasonable design now.

What if we just… talked to it? Or texted it? Or — eventually — thought at it through whatever interface comes next? Voice. Phone. Wearable. Implant. Direct neural. Whatever ships in the next 20 years.

The browser is starting to feel like the horse-drawn carriage of computing — a thing we kept calling "the internet" long after the underlying medium changed shape. We just haven't admitted it yet.

So I want to ask the people in this subreddit who actually build things:

1. What's the single worst thing about using a web browser? Not the most annoying — the worst. The thing you'd eliminate first if you could.
2. What would you not miss if browsers disappeared tomorrow? Tabs? Passwords? Cookie banners? The constant context-switching between sites? The way you have to learn a new UI for every product?
3. If you had to bet on what the next generation of the internet looks like — knowing what you know now about LLMs, agents, voice, mobile, and where compute is heading — what shape does it take? Browsers improved? Replaced? By what?

I have my own answer (I'm building it), but I'd genuinely rather hear yours first. The thing I keep noticing in my own work is that every time I build around the browser instead of through it, the product feels lighter. Faster. Less hostile. Like I'm not asking the user to do my work for me anymore.

So — am I onto something, or have I just been on a streetcar in New Orleans for too long? Tell me where I'm wrong.

I've been building software for 30 years. Started waiting tables on the floor as a 19-year-old, taught myself to code at night, became an enterprise architect, sat with hundreds of operators watching how their work actually gets done.

Here's what I've come to believe.

The internet wasn't built for normal people. It was built for engineers, and then we handed it to everyone else and said "good luck."

Want a website? Pick a platform. Learn it. Pay $30/month. Hire a designer, or call your nephew. Want to publish a blog post? Write it in Google Docs. Copy to WordPress. Find an image in Canva. Upload it. Add SEO. Schedule it in Buffer. Six apps, six logins, forty-five minutes — for one post that took ten minutes to write.

The average person manages 300+ passwords. The average household pays $273/month for subscriptions they can't name. Publishing one idea requires six different tools. Starting one business requires a registered agent, an LLC, a Stripe account, a domain, a logo, a website, an email tool, and a learning curve for every one of them.

This isn't a skill problem. It's a tool problem.

I've spent the last several months building something different. The whole premise: what if the internet didn't require apps, passwords, or logins at all? What if you just texted what you wanted, and it happened?

I built the latest version of it sitting on a streetcar in New Orleans, riding into the French Quarter, with a roadie in one hand and my phone in the other. By the time I got off, my agent had done market research, drafted a launch tweet, and put up a website for the test business I was prototyping.

No app. No password. Just text.

Posting this here because I want to know — is this resonance, or is this just my own frustration talking? What's the moment in the last 30 days where the internet made you feel dumb, when you're not?

(For anyone curious: textos.ai. First 1,000 founder spots before public launch. Not pitching, just being transparent about what I'm building.)