From Comic Books to AI-Powered Code: What has changed in the last decade for most devs

Out goes => Figma In comes => Stitch Out Goes Traditional IDEs =>VSCode In comes => Cursor IDE Out goes => Lovable In comes => Jules Out goes => Terminal CommandPrompt In comes => Warp

The Past: When Building Meant Coordinating 40 People for 90 Days

I was in charge of publishing comic books, and comic book content was my life. A career that had started in business and corporate was now managing designers, copywriters, and a research team, one of the best teams I had ever worked with. I loved and still love cartoons and the simplicity in which they can communicate complex messages. Who hasn’t had fascination or joy watching cartoons in their childhood or even now?

You’d think making comic books would be just drawing and publishing either digitally or in print, but we had a backward 90-day calendar managing a schedule with over 40 people working in coordination. The varied skillset from sketching to penciling, inking (Manga creatives), and coloring took just the first month. Even working later with Amazon would not beat the level of coordination that happened with just taking one month’s comic book to print within 90 days because it was all about managing talent with empathy.

Let’s cut the long story short: I was promoted to head the newly formed outreach department, which focused on research for real-life stories to back the comics & prove there was evidence of change brought about by the comic book CTA. After working in this department and utilizing IBM’s SPSS to analyze data from hundreds of surveys, the tech bug was rekindled again. After all, my high school nickname was dotkom. 😁

The Transition: From Photoshop to Figma, From Waterfall to Agile

Tech has come a long way, and that’s why I decided to write this piece. When I was with the comic book company, Photoshop, CorelDRAW, and many more tools were the in-thing for getting a design to go digital. Over the years, tech innovations have been disrupted or their importance diminished for anyone to build a career using the old tools. I never thought in 10 years tech would change so much.

After I had immigrated (legally 😁 you never know who’s reading) to the US, I moved from Socal to Nocal (San Francisco) and became a moderately skilled Full-Stack Software Developer. I understood the next step would be sitting down with the clients, finding out whether they had a budget, and the most promising part, I knew they’d pay. Of course, later I learned a client can encounter hardships at any time, and it’s better to take a down payment or treat that junior developer period as a learning aha! moment where you do free gigs & never mind the effort.

The app I was working on was for a shooting competition, and the client was a very wealthy Texan who knew this competitive shooting business in and out (their burgers are the best; don’t forget animal fries). I did the designs in Figma, had them approved, and was about to embark on building the Django-Ninja (FastAPI equivalent) backend with a Postgres DB. I would then finalize with building the React frontend, dockerize it, and use Jenkins for CI/CD, or better yet, GitHub Actions. After beta, I would configure Grafana and Prometheus for monitoring and observability, you know, that status.mywebsite.com page showing uptime and downtime.

Shooter360 Figma Design before Stitch.withgoogle.com came along

That was then, when a client who didn’t pay would literally affect almost two months of negotiations and planning. But now… 10+ years later…

The Present: Building in Hours What Once Took Months

It takes hours to perfect designs using Stitch (https://stitch.withgoogle.com). Create a GitHub repo (my GitHub username: komerela). Code using Jules (Google’s autonomous AI coding agent )that works while you sleep/rest (We don’t sleep). Run a virtual environment in Warp terminal to test the application locally. Dockerize and then add the application to Docker Cloud. Deploy using Coolify (preferred) or Dokploy. If you want to increase a layer of network security, use Tailscale and proxy your server traffic & prevent DDOS for your application using Cloudflare.

This is faster, more efficient, and delivers results. Still, in this day and age, the planning phase is important, as well as getting a skilled developer who understands what the older and modern tools are capable of. At times, I usually leave Warp and utilize the usual terminal due to inherent advantages I could go through later.

Cancel The old Developer Tools, Enter the New (2026)

Figma Stitch VSCode Lovable Jules Terminal CommandPrompt Warp

Currently, I’m studying my master’s in software engineering at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF)while leading a tech startup as CTO. Always broke 🥹, always busy, no job, and every day I see AI tools becoming better and better. In my first class last year, we were learning about Large Software Engineering Projects’ Planning with examples of how IBM, HP, or the US military (btw, they’re pioneers in technical project planning) did it over three decades ago, why it works better to utilize sequence numbering as well as optimally defining use cases and other cool things. Recently, I’ve been using Jules to do just that, including the project planning.

The Future: Solo Founders Building $1million companies

I’m afraid what is coming in the near future will be even better. I now believe solo founders with sufficient technical knowledge building million-dollar companies will be possible. My focus is now to continue building multi-agent tools that will amplify our brand and other brands out there because building will be easy, but selling will be extremely difficult in the near future.

Here’s why the economics are shifting in favor of technical founders:

Cost Compression: What required a 5-person engineering team ($500K+ annually) now costs $200–500/month in AI tools and infrastructure. Jules handles coding tasks that previously took developers hours. Stitch designs interfaces in minutes that previously required days of designer time.

Speed Acceleration: Shipping MVPs in days instead of months. Jules works asynchronously, submitting a task before bed, waking up to a completed pull request with tests and documentation. Iterate faster than competitors with traditional teams.

Quality Consistency: AI tools don’t have bad days, don’t need management, and maintain coding standards automatically. Jules reviews its own code, catches bugs, and suggests improvements before you even see it.

Multi-Agent Orchestration: At Tinypesa, we’re building marketing engines that run autonomously using multi-agents with costs per ad being less than USD ____ (Of course this is our trade secret but how low the amount is will surprise you). It’s so low we just believe we might have cracked pushing ads without influencers, our influencers are our autonomous reinforcement learning agents.

The Competitive Advantage: Technical Fluency + AI Leverage

The new competitive moat isn’t just having a great idea or even great execution. It’s understanding how to orchestrate AI tools to build and scale faster than anyone else. Knowing when to use Jules for backend refactoring, when to prototype in Stitch, when to deploy via Coolify versus cloud platforms, and how to chain these tools together into workflows that compound your productivity.

We own tech products for payments infrastructure, all apps have to process payments at one point or another. We’ve been testing our online marketing engine that works autonomously. The combination of technical infrastructure (payment processing) and autonomous marketing (multi-agent systems) creates a flywheel: better products attract more users, more users generate more data, more data trains better agents, better agents acquire users more efficiently.

Check Out the Shooter360 Design

Figma Prototype: https://www.figma.com/proto/B2y1imoRs2WEP82xt2jlxQ/Shooter360-Concept-APP?node-id=1105-140&p=f&t=pVjI1yrj9JQLbPaI-1&scaling=min-zoom&content-scaling=fixed&page-id=1%3A2

Follow the link to copy the design or hire this broke grad student for peanuts or invest in his startup, and you’ll enjoy working with me. Check out the full Figma design if you’re into competitive shooting and want to transform this to become your club’s app. We know how much IPSC and others make it hard to track points accumulation:

The Shooter360 app showcases what’s possible when you combine thoughtful design with modern development workflows. What once required months of back-and-forth with designers, developers, and clients can now be prototyped, tested, and deployed in days.

The Bottom Line

From coordinating 40 people over 90 days to publish one comic book to shipping production-ready MVP apps in 1 month (I won’t lie to you, not 48hrs if you want an applicaiton that has been fully tested), the trajectory is clear. The future belongs to technically fluent founders who can leverage AI tools to build, ship, and scale faster than traditional teams.

The question isn’t whether AI will change software development. It already has. The question is: are you positioning yourself to take advantage of this shift, or are you still building like it’s 2015?

Building is getting easier. Selling is getting harder. The winners will be those who master both.

Connect with me or dm:

• GitHub: komerela
• Linkedin: dotkoome(PST Timezone applies — Whatsapp)
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/proto/B2y1imoRs2WEP82xt2jlxQ/Shooter360-Concept-APP

Mwongera is a currently shipping payment infrastructure and multi-agent marketing products from California & Nairobi. Broke California State University — Fullerton Software Engineering Grad student seeking coffee money (It’s the state of tech) and Business-side co-founders / Investors who understand the future’s already here to invest in us $100,000, but you’re the business person and we’re the technical partners, you know what you want and what we want is to scale to 1,000,000 monthly users within 12 months for both payment infra and autonomous marketing. Alpha testing done for autonomous tool, Beta testing done… for Payment API Platform