About

The Thesis

Almost everything you interact with professionally runs on code. Your accounting software. Your learning management system. Your contract templates. Your GPS-guided equipment. Your building information models. Your payroll. Your scheduling. Your supply chain.

Accountants, teachers, lawyers, farmers, construction crews. None of them think of themselves as working in code. All of them do, every day, through the business tools they depend on.

In a first-world economy, it is difficult to extract code from your working life. The question is whether you see it or not.

Work Is Code is about seeing it.

The Abstraction

Machine language was abstracted into assembly. Assembly was abstracted into programming languages. Programming languages are now being abstracted into natural language.

That last step is the one that changes everything. When the barrier between "I have an idea" and "I have working code" is just the ability to clearly articulate what you want, the distinction between "technical" and "non-technical" work dissolves. Articulating what you want clearly is what every professional already does in their domain. They just don't realize it's the same skill.

AI didn't create this reality. It made it impossible to ignore.

The Exception

I do woodworking. My hand planes and chisels predate CNC machines. They are genuinely code-free tools. Almost nothing else in my life is.

That contrast is what made the pattern obvious. The hand plane works because of physics and craft. Everything else in my professional life works because of code. The websites, the APIs, the databases, the deployment pipelines, the email systems, the calendar tools, the accounting software, the contracts, the proposals. All code. All abstracted far enough that most people forget.

What This Site Is

Practitioner guides for people who want to stop pretending code isn't already central to their work and start building with that understanding.

These articles come from running multiple concurrent projects across healthcare, fintech, and edtech as a solo operator using AI as an execution layer. They describe how I actually work, not how I think other people should work.

I'm Bert Carroll. I founded Ask the Human, a technology consulting practice. I'm CTO of Orbiit Services (recovery ecosystem, healthcare) and fractional CTO at College Decoded and Astra P2C.

Related Work