In 2007 I catalogued 18 wave energy devices and 17 companies for my Diploma Thesis. Nineteen years later, with Peter Thiel backing a $140M wave-powered AI data center startup, I went back to see which of them survived, which closed, and which new players entered the game.

Can a single developer, using AI tools, build a meaningful analytics platform over a dataset that would normally require a full data team? Over one weekend I harvested, cleaned, and analysed 124,655 KIMDIS procurement records — finding that 83.9% of awards, worth €1.14 billion, bypassed competitive tender.

Large Language Models are exceptional execution tools, but predicting language is fundamentally different from understanding it. As processing power hyper-concentrates upstream, the future of scale won't belong to those who own the data centers, but to the agile builders who use the compute to actually execute.