Note · 26 August 2026
[de] 38/26 Studio
Picking Up Where I Left Off.
I have never been an employee. And I have never done just one thing. What changed last year is not my curiosity, but what stood in its way.
Everything that interested me
I have been self-employed since 1999, working for clients and their projects. And from the start with everything about that work that interested me: graphic design, photography, concept work, planning, web design, and yes, programming too, as far as I got with it. From 2000 to 2018 an advertising agency was added, eighteen years as a creative director, freelance, without giving up my own work.
That is where I learned how a concept comes about long before anyone unpacks a camera. How to explain an idea without defending it. And how many good drafts fail on a badly framed question.
Why the focus narrowed
From 2018 onwards the focus lay more on photography. Not because the rest interested me less, but because one person can only cover so many fields in depth. A website that is genuinely good took weeks. A tool for my own studio was simply out of reach. So you do the thing that is finished quickest and costed most cleanly. That was the camera.
The limit was never the curiosity. The limit was time, technology, and the question of how much one person can carry.
What changed last year
Since I started working with Claude, that limit is gone. I describe in plain language what something should do, look at what comes back, discard, sharpen. Vibe coding is the name for it. To me it feels like designing, only with different material.
It began with small helpers for tedious steps. By now it is websites without WordPress, client portals, a digital team of named working roles, and tools that map the whole workflow of a business. Things I would once have needed a team for, a team I never had.
That is why I repositioned myself completely last year. Not because I started something new, but because I am picking up where I left off years ago, with a tool that did not exist back then, at a time when the whole industry is being turned over.
I am still not a programmer
The misunderstanding arrives quickly: build software with AI and you count as a programmer. I am not one and I will not become one. I do not read other people’s code for fun.
What I can do is the question that comes first. Understand how someone actually works, and build something that fits them rather than the other way round. That is the same work as with a brand, a catalogue, or a series of pictures. Only the material is different.
What this means for you
You do not get a service from a list. You get someone who first asks what this is really about. Sometimes the answer is a picture. Sometimes a brand, a website, a tool that gives you back two days a month. Usually some of it together, because these things rarely arrive neatly separated.
One person to talk to, one eye, four crafts. And the curiosity that was always there.