Dries Buytaert

In The Big Blind, investor Fred Wilson highlights how AI is revolutionizing geothermal energy discovery. This sentence stood out for me:

It is wonderfully ironic that the technology that is creating an energy crisis is also a potential solve for that energy crisis.

AI consumes massive amounts of electricity, but also helps to discover new sources of clean energy. The source of demand might become the source of supply.

Energy scarcity is a discovery problem. The geothermal energy was always there. The bottleneck was our ability to find it. AI can analyze seismic data, geological surveys and satellite imagery at a scale no human can match.

The quote stood out because technology rarely cleans up its own mess. More cars don't fix traffic and more coal doesn't fix pollution. Usually it takes a different technology to clean up the mess, if it can be cleaned up at all. For example, the internet created information overload, and search engines were invented to help manage it.

But here, for AI and energy, the system using the resource might also be the one capable of discovering more of it.

I see a similar pattern in open source.

Most open source projects depend on a small group of maintainers who review code, maintain infrastructure and keep everything running. They shoulder a disproportionate share of the work.

AI risks adding to that burden. It makes it easier for people to generate code and submit pull requests, but reviewing those code contributions still falls on the same few maintainers. When contributions scale up, review capacity has to keep pace.

And just like with energy discovery, AI might also be the solution. There already exist AI-powered review tools that can scan pull requests, enforce project standards and surface issues before a human even looks at them. If you believe AI-generated code is here to stay (I do), AI-assisted review might not be optional.

I'm no Fred Wilson, but as a small angel investor, these tools look like a good way to go long on vibe coding. And as Drupal's project lead, I'd love to collaborate with the providers of these tools. If we can make open source maintenance more scalable and sustainable, everyone benefits.

So yes, the technology making a situation worse might also be capable of helping to solve it. That is rare enough to pay attention to.