Remember the good old days when we had “Internet time”? It was back in the late 1990s, when the dot-coms moved so fast that building businesses and fortunes would take only months instead of years.

Seems so quaint now.

I think we are now living in AI time. It seems like today, things that used to take months are now taking weeks—or even days. Shoot, you might even say hours.

My head is spinning with how much change has happened in—literally—the last few weeks. It almost feels like we woke up one morning and just stopped writing code. And of course, this has everyone freaking out. Developers are worried about massive layoffs and what junior developers are going to do, and if there will even be any junior developers at all.

It all seemed to culminate in this article by Matt Shumer, “Something Big is Happening,” which went viral last week. (It’s not often that an article on the .dev domain makes it to the top of the Drudge Report.)

Shumer tapped into those fears. And he’s right to. The fear isn’t irrational—it’s the natural response to watching a job that you’ve spent years mastering get handed off to a machine. That’s a real loss, even if what comes next turns out to be better.

Last month I wrote about how code is no longer the bottleneck. I pointed out how choosing what to build will become even harder when we can build 20 things instead of just two.

If you are hesitant to let AI write your code for you because it makes mistakes or doesn’t write code exactly the way you like it written, consider this: The same is true of any other developer on your team. No other person will write code that is mistake-free and architected exactly like you want things done. You don’t hesitate to delegate tasks to fellow developers, so why do you hesitate to pass a task to a tireless coder who builds things hundreds(!) of times faster than any human?

And it’s the “hundreds of times” faster that has everyone nervous. And they have a right to be. Many companies—Salesforce, Amazon, Microsoft, and more—are laying off people, citing automation and AI efficiencies among the reasons. Things are starting to change, and there are many people whose lives will be affected. There is reason for concern.

But there is reason for optimism in the turmoil. Garry Tan, the CEO of YCombinator, recently said, “Our fear of the future is directly proportional to how small our ambitions are.” I don’t want to minimize the trauma of getting laid off, but the thing that is causing people to be laid off is also the thing that will cause an explosion of new ideas. And those new ideas will lead to new jobs.

For a while now, I’ve been keeping a list of silly, goofy, and maybe brilliant ideas for apps and websites. Some are simple, and some are ambitious, but every one of them required more time to implement than I had when the idea struck. Now? I built one of them this past weekend. Actually, I built it on Sunday afternoon.

Now, I’m not saying I’m ready to quit my day job, but imagine if the barrier to implementing an idea goes from “It will take me six months of evenings and weekends to build this” to “It will be done before I can cook dinner.” Lots of people out there are going to have an idea that will enable them to quit their day job and hire people to make the business a reality. Instead of 10 new digital companies starting up every week, will there be 100, or 1,000? The opportunity seems endless.

And not only will we have new job titles and new things to do, but we’ll be creating things that no one has thought up yet. “Let a hundred flowers bloom” will turn into “Let a million flowers bloom.”

Now that we are moving in AI time, ideas won’t wait for permission anymore. They can bloom almost the moment you think of them.