This is a post I originally wrote as an Instagram story in October 2025.

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Back when Adobe Flash ruled the web, there were senior colleagues who were brilliant at it. People with that skill were rare at the time, so they made very good money — good enough that some of them dropped out of school, figuring they could live off it. As everyone knows, Flash was pronounced dead in 2020. So what happened to those veterans? Did they all starve?

Some of them spent the rest of their days kicking themselves, wishing they had at least finished their degree. Others, meanwhile, found a way to carry their careers forward in a different shape.

The way I see it, what split their futures apart came down to where they had placed their focus. The people who fixated on Flash itself, the tool, lost their expertise the moment Flash disappeared. But the people who had used Flash merely as a tool to do design kept their expertise even after Flash was gone.

I recently had some work that involved ComfyUI, and as I poked around trying to learn it, the Flash era came back to me. Online course companies stoke the fear that you’ll fall behind if you don’t master Comfy, and students take a course that walks them through 30 example workflows and come out the other side as “AI experts.”

I’m not trying to say what’s right and what’s wrong here. I’m not trying to criticize anyone, either. In the short term, learning Comfy itself might well be the smart choice in all sorts of ways. Who can really say how things will turn out?

Still, it’s worth remembering that tools always get easier. There was a time when compositing faces in Photoshop was an impressive skill, but now you can knock it out in a single click with OmniFlux. Anyway, there’s no one right answer. But don’t we need the capacity to look across many directions at once, whether the horizon is short or long? In the end, tools exist to solve problems, don’t they?

And this isn’t a story confined to design. Nearly every cutting-edge image and video generation model today is built on the diffusion model, and that diffusion model relies — both theoretically and practically — on Gaussian noise that follows a Gaussian distribution. Yes, the same Gaussian as in the Gaussian blur or Gaussian noise that any Photoshop user knows well.

That Gaussian distribution was popularized by the legendary German mathematician Gauss, and although more than a hundred years have passed since his death, his mathematics is still in use.

How many years will the diffusion model last? Photoshop? Comfy?