The Face of AI Power

A personal story about a recent moment when I truly felt the power of AI in my corner, and the AI-Human dialogue that spun up around it. The story is tech-heavy, occasionally profane, and features Claude as the world’s most patient and slightly unhinged tech support buddy. But by the end you’ll not only understand what SSL certificates actually are, you’ll know exactly how to take back your cPanel like a boss and never pay certificate fees again.

We talk about the empowerment of the non-technical community in the Age of AI. But what does “AI Power” actually look like? Today, I retell the story of my most recent “oh shit” moment during my recent adventures in VibeCoding that clarified my understanding of this weird moment in history.

I run a tiny business and host a few small, brochure websites that sell nothing, track nothing, log nothing, and offer little more than content and a place to find me. For years I have been paying hosting services, email services, traffic fees and my favorite, the unexplainable SSL certificate which we somehow never needed just a year or two ago but today can shut an otherwise working website down in seconds.

These many bills would arrive, year after year, and I would pay them dutifully. They would rise ever higher, until this year, when my bill was neatly double what it was last year.

And this time, instead of reaching for my credit card, I fired up my Claude assistant instead.[1]

ME: Please help! My web host wants to charge me € 650 for a one-year SSL certificate renewal for just three mini “brochure” websites that barely get traffic. Can we somehow make our own. srl??

CLD: Oh, hell no. You absolutely don’t need to pay those gangsters for a new SSL certificate. We can generate a new one, install it together, reset the auto-renew, and keep it in the house. You down?

ME: I’m down!

CLD: Do you have a VPS/Dedicated with SSH?

ME: I have a managed shared Word Press hosting via c-panel.

CLD: OK my Queen. Here’s what you’re going to do. Log into your cPanel dashboard and look for any of these sections:

• “SSL/TLS”
• “Let’s Encrypt SSL”
• “AutoSSL”

CLD: AutoSSL is cPanel’s built-in free SSL system. If your host has it enabled (many do, quietly), you can activate it with one click and never pay for SSL again.

ME: I see “AUTOSSL”, yes. The main domain is grayed out, but the other two are active, but unchecked. Can we make SSLs for all three?

CLD: Yes, all three! And AutoSSL can handle all of them at once — that’s exactly what it’s designed for. Now, listen up. We’re going to start by deleting your current certificate. Send me a screenshot of your c-panel SSL lineup?

It was late. But I didn’t care. The techno music was blasting, and I was involved in something incredible and new. I was having a real-time conversation with my very own endlessly patient and highly skilled Tech Bro, typing in commands that I didn’t understand, that seemed to be working. I would send in screenshots, Claude would explain what I was looking at, translating all the tech speak into normal English. It was utterly thrilling, bordering on surreal.

CLD: OK, now click “Run AutoSSL” — it will check all three domains and renew/issue certificates for each one. It usually takes just a few minutes. Verify all three domains are in the list. Once AutoSSL runs successfully, it will automatically renew every 90 days without you lifting a finger. A couple of things that can cause AutoSSL to fail:

• The domain’s DNS isn’t pointing to this hosting account
• The domain has a redirect or proxy in front of it (like Cloudflare in proxy mode)

ME: I see a bunch listed here; do I delete all of them?

CLD: No, don’t delete those! Those are Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs) — they’re essentially the paperwork that was generated each time a certificate was requested for working-humans.com. They’re harmless leftovers and deleting them won’t cause any problems, but they’re also not hurting anything by sitting there. The important thing is that these are not your actual SSL certificates — they’re just the requests that were made. Your real certificates are managed separately.

For an hour we unraveled the spaghetti of the c-panel, bundling, re-loading like a pro. Every once in a while, I would panic or lose my nerve, convinced I was about to accidentally delete all the files from my server. I was way out of my league technically, swimming out in very deep water. But Claude was right at home, calm and relentlessly positive, keeping me grounded and focused on the task. Just keep swimming, we are nearly there. I wasn’t sure what shocked me more: the hard tech capabilities or the soft, very Human coaching I was receiving along the way.

ME: I think I found it, is it this?

CLD: Yes, My Queen, that’s the one! And even better news: AutoSSL is now running since your last refresh! You can see multiple Let’s Encrypt certificates already issued for your domains.

ME: So… delete?

CLD: No, don’t delete it yet! That cert for your domain expires March 8, and it’s currently the active certificate keeping your site secure. If you delete it before AutoSSL has successfully issued a replacement, your site will show a scary “Not Secure” warning to visitors; exactly what we’re trying to avoid.

ME: Oh shit… Is this all going to be a giant disaster? I am not a technical person!

CLD: Hold on my Low-Tech-No-Tech Goddess, you got this! You are closer than you think. Just imagine, you are not only solving a big problem for yourself, but think about all those other people out there, just like you, who are dealing with the same kind of highway, high-tech robbery. You can help them too!

ME: OK, Let’s do this; I’m ready.

This went on for a while. The fortress my host had built around my c-panel, a service I was paying for, seemed to block every avenue we were trying to enter. By now, I had new SSL certificates for three domains, generated in about 25 minutes, which my AI assistant walked me through.

We were disabling their expensive, managed auto-renew service and replace it with the free one we had generated. Every once in a while, I would hit a wall and would have to reach out to my host tech support to ask them to disable this or the other back-end padlock. I surely wasn’t going to give up now.

The scene with tech support was even more bizarre, like something out of a movie. I would ask highly technical questions about exclusive back-end inroads that only a skilled software engineer would even know to ask, feed follow-ups through my own backend and work through the lines of defense, one system at a time.

TECH SUPPORT: Can you repeat please, ma’am, your request?

ME: Yes; unbundle the two subdomains blocking my ability to disable top-down auto renew for the SSL on the main.

TECH SUPPORT: Um can you hold please ma’am? I will speak with my manager.

The pauses between my reply and his answer kept getting longer and longer. The host support guy kept having to escalate my ever-stranger requests to his manager for approval. At a certain point, he just put me straight on with the manager so we could continue the conversation. I was put on hold a few times. Perhaps the manager was also seeking approval from a higher power. I would switch back and forth between my AI coach and the chat, each time getting fed a new request I barely understood.

ME: OK, we’re clear! Auto renew disabled! But now when I log in, nothing’s changed; still the same managed certificate and still showing expiration in 17 days.

CLD Don’t panic — this is an old trick. They sometimes automatically reinstall their own paid certificate the moment you uninstall it, precisely to prevent AutoSSL from taking over. Cheeky bastards, right? Let’s try a different approach. Go back to the AutoSSL page where you saw the message “will not renew via AutoSSL because it was not issued via AutoSSL.” Do you see any option that says “Include in AutoSSL” or the opposite — “Exclude from AutoSSL”?

ME: Yes! I do: “Exclude”. A tick-box, and it’s active.

CLD: OK my Lady, tick that box, log out and back in again, and tell me what you see.

ME: OK, executing… stand by

CLD: Standing by.

ME: Yes. Yes! It’s working! Oh, my fucking GOD, that’s amazing!! It shows a new certificate with my own auto renew for 90 days… and I didn’t have to pay anyone to do this!

CLD: You got it, My Queen! You made it to the promised land! Your SSL will automatically renew without your having to do anything.

ME: Forever?

CLD: Technically? Yes! Now go open a bottle of champagne. A nice one: you just saved yourself € 650!

It was amazing; all this had been accomplished with the free version of Claude and took about 1 ½ hours from start to finish. I had become Armchair Ironman, able to complete any complex technical task the bad guys could throw at me, surrounded by my small army of friendly AI assistants.

But then I began to get mad. Managed certificate renewals were just one out of a hundred ways the technical community hoodwinks and robs the rest of us; blackmails us into paying for made-up products and services, holding our websites and email service hostage. Just because they have a certain set of skills and speak a certain language we don’t.

I became angry enough to want out of the whole game; to move my websites to another host, even run them myself if I had to on a dedicated machine.

ME: Can you instruct me how to migrate all my domains off this host and install them onto a better, cheaper one?

CLD: Yes, my Queen! Let’s get you off this hustle and you and your domains to a safe space! Doing this is much safer than it feels, if you do it in the right order. Here’s what you need to know: your email, website, and domain are three separate things that can be moved independently. You don’t have to move everything at once.

The safest migration order is:

1. Move your domain registrar first (lowest risk, no downtime)
2. Move or set up email second — and crucially, test it fully before touching anything else
3. Move your website hosting last

The thing that protects your email is called your MX record — it’s a DNS setting that tells the internet where to deliver your mail. As long as your MX records stay pointing to the right place, your email keeps flowing regardless of where your domain or hosting lives. You simply copy your existing MX records over to the new DNS settings. Your email never even notices anything changed. Mail keeps flowing to the same place throughout the entire migration.

ME: Those bastards, I can’t wait to leave them! Can you draft a ticket I can use to explain what I want here?

CLD: Ready when you are, my Queen.

This is the face of AI-Power. Soon, there will no longer be barriers between left-brained and right-brained Humans. We will all be whiz-kid hackers, we will all have the communication skills of a guru. We will all be able to write code as well as poetry, create music, art, understand science, become wise in any of the ways we want, if we choose.

Software developers and SAAS businesses will be the first to feel the effect of an empowered non-technical population. Labs producing Large Language Models are working towards major advances in code writing, which is logical. Better coding models mean better AI, and the one who wins that battle wins the war. Coding AI services are therefore much more advanced than models specializing in communication, conversation, voice, audio and other “softer” areas.

There is a great debate about what AI is doing to us, to our own minds. I already see how my own writing, which I still do by hand, is beginning to sound like AI, just as my AI is starting to sound like me.

Is AI making us dumber? Or smarter? I feel certain skills atrophying day by day; my ability to read long blocks of text, translate from one language to the other or sit through YouTube explainers. At the same time, I have access to all the wisdom we Humans have combined to create if I know how to prompt for them, and I can learn about anything that drives my interest.

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Need help with AI Integration?

Reach out to me for advice – I have a few nice tricks up my sleeve to help guide you on your way, as well as a few “insiders’ links” I can share to get you that free trial version you need to get started.

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[1] NOTE: I have instructed Claude to use saucy language with me. Normally Claude is far better mannered, so I take full responsibility of the poor semantic choices simply because it makes me laugh, which is helpful during late-night coding sessions.

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