Why The Trinity Tribe is built to outgrow me

In late May 2026 I was told, plainly and without any drama, that I had been replaced by artificial intelligence (AI). Not as an insult. As a description. The kind of interface work I used to be paid for is now generated by tools like Google Stitch, and clients increasingly build their own projects rather than pay a designer to do it. My most recent contracts had quietly dried up earlier that spring; this was simply the reason. Whoever delivered the news was right, and I already knew it, because I had started doing the same thing myself. What surprised me was the feeling. Not fear. Relief.

It started at sixteen

I was ready for that conversation because the idea behind The Trinity Tribe had been forming for six years. Most of that time it lived in my head and in a sprawling Notion workspace, waiting. I was waiting for the idea to ripen, and waiting for myself: to mature as a designer, to get the user experience and interface (UX/UI) craft properly into my hands, to learn from the agencies and clients I worked with what people actually need and where the real gap sits. You cannot design a different way of working until you understand the current one well enough to see what it costs.

The seed is older still. At sixteen I watched a documentary about Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project, and it rearranged something. The world runs the way it does, it argued, because people designed it that way. The economy, the cities, the incentives: none of it is weather. Someone made it, which means someone could make it differently. I never got that thought back out of my head. It went from a teenager’s conviction, through vegan philosophy, to solarpunk, and finally to a way of working: building digital products that tell the truth about what they cost.

Why I waited, and what finally moved me

What I did not have was a way to start. I knew one thing with total clarity: you cannot run an agency alone. The work is too broad, the surface area too large for one person to hold. So for years I looked for a co-founder. A handful of people toyed with the idea alongside me, but each drifted off once it became clear that co-founding is work, not a title, and that the effort starts long before there is anything to show for it. I kept doing good work for other people while the thing I wanted to build sat in Notion, unbuilt. One more person felt like the only door in, and it stayed shut.

Then two things matured at the same time: the idea, and the tools. While the industry was using AI to remove designers from the budget, I was using it to do the opposite. I had started replacing my Figma work with Claude Code, going deeper into automation, building the operating system that now runs The Trinity Tribe behind the scenes. AI did not take the work away from me so much as hand it back at a different scale. It gave one person enough reach to start something that used to require a team.

So when I was finally told the old way was over, it did not land as a loss. It landed as permission. I am fairly sure I would not have made the call on my own. The push came from outside, the readiness from years inside, and the two met this spring.

Why I didn’t want it to be mine

Here is the part that matters most, and it is the least obvious. Once AI made it possible to start alone, I had to decide what kind of thing to build. The easy version is a studio that is a vehicle for one person’s taste: my eye, my vision, my name on the door. I deliberately did not build that.

Part of the reason is plain honesty about my own limits. I am still learning, and I expect to be learning for the rest of my life. I am not the most experienced person in the room on design, and I am further from it on engineering, marketing, management, and half the other things a studio has to be good at. A practice built to depend on one person’s knowledge inherits the edges of that knowledge. A practice built around a community can become good at far more than any single founder ever could.

There is a structural version of the same point. A studio shaped entirely around its founder is a monoculture: one point of view, one set of blind spots, one person who has to be in the room for anything to happen. That is the same fragile pattern the work itself argues against, systems that depend on a single owner and cannot be maintained once that person leaves. It would be strange to sell resilience and run a business with none.

So The Trinity Tribe is designed, from the first day, to grow past me. The name is the plan. Trinity is not three people; it is three values the work holds in common. Tribe is whoever comes to share them. The real answer to “you cannot do this alone” was never a single co-founder. It was a community: a shared view that surfaces from many people rather than direction handed down from one.

What it looks like when it’s real

Fully grown, a community-driven agency does not look like a studio with a big mailing list. It looks like a tribe doing the work: collaborators, clients and readers who hold the three values and shape where the practice goes. Direction comes from the edges rather than from a founder’s desk. The studio’s sense of what it is thickens as the community grows, the way a forest’s underground network gets richer with every tree it connects. There is no centre to capture, and in time no single person to follow, which is the point.

I want to be honest about where this sits on launch day: almost nowhere. The site you are reading this on is new. The tribe is mostly empty chairs. I am one person with an operating system, a clear philosophy, and a public invitation. That gap between the idea and the reality is not something to hide. It is the work. A community you could design into existence on day one would not be worth belonging to.

What work owes the world

Underneath all of this is one belief about technology, and it is easy to get wrong. Technology and nature are not opposites. Technology is the living system continuing through a new medium, the same process that grew forests and nervous systems, now running through us. Being replaced by AI did not shake that belief. It confirmed it.

But the belief has a shadow that has to be named in the same breath: cancer is also natural growth. Growth that consumes its host until both die is completely natural and completely fatal. So “technology is nature’s next step” is only half a sentence. The full version is that it stays nature’s next step only while it stays in harmony, and the entire job is telling the difference. A carbon audit is that test with a number attached, the same act as refusing to make a green claim you cannot defend (a subject with its own deadlines and legal teeth). How we build to that standard is a longer story; what matters here is the belief underneath. Work should relate to the world like an organism that gives back more than it takes, stays legible to the people who depend on it, and does not quietly make them dependent on it.

What I’d call success

So I will not measure this in revenue, or headcount, or how widely my own name travels. Those are easy to grow, and easy to grow badly. Success, for The Trinity Tribe, looks like two things. The smaller one: a studio its community genuinely owns, where I am one node rather than the centre, and the practice would carry on if I stepped back. The larger one: a world where “what does this cost the living system?” is an ordinary question, asked by default, by people who never heard of us.

If The Trinity Tribe works, the strangest sign of it will be this. At some point the studio will stop feeling like mine. That is not the risk of the plan. It is the plan.

If this reads like something you would want to be part of rather than a service you would buy, that is the right instinct. We are about to open a community, on Discord first and then on a home of our own. The announcement goes out first to the people already following along: find The Trinity Tribe on LinkedIn or Bluesky and you will not miss it.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Trinity Tribe?

A solarpunk design studio founded in 2026, built to grow into a community-driven agency rather than a conventional studio. It makes digital products designed to be efficient, honest about their environmental cost, and independent of infrastructure their owners cannot control.

What does “community-driven agency” mean?

The studio is structured to be shaped, and eventually owned, by the people who share its values: collaborators, clients and readers, not a single founder. Direction surfaces from the community rather than being handed down from the top.

You were replaced by AI, so why use AI to build the company?

Because the tool is not the problem; how it is used is. AI used to cut people out of a budget and AI used to extend what one person can build are different choices. The test is whether the result stays in harmony or only consumes.

What does success look like for The Trinity Tribe?

Not revenue or scale. A studio its community owns, where the founder is one node among many, and a world where asking “what does this cost the living system?” is a normal part of building anything.