I shared some of my paradoxical challenges in my current situation:

• As a creator, I need a private space and room to make things, play my own music, and be loud on calls when I need to

• As a collaborator, I need space for people to roll up their sleeves, whiteboard some ideas, and sit next to me and make something

It turns out that it’s really hard to get both of these things right at the same time.

The AI era has blurred the lines between creator, engineer, and operator. We’re constantly toggling between deep work, live demos, and human collaboration, sometimes all in the same hour. But spaces we inhabit haven’t caught up.

What we need now are adaptive environments: Flexible studios where builders can move fluidly between making, teaching, recording, and collaborating. But how?

We had desks where we could leave things behind from one day to the next, and we had meeting rooms, specifically designed to collaborate with other humans for creative ideation sessions.

The pandemic changed things. We figured out how to smash desks into tiny corners of our homes and we called it good enough. We spent more time glued to our computers, multi-tasking on video calls (while pretending we aren’t) and we stopped showing up. AI has accelerated this even more, ushering in a new wave of solo builders, founders, and creators who just need an activated influencer audience and a killer studio setup to go to market.

The time to build is now. But if you’re just starting off as a solopreneur in the AI age, where do you go to get your work done?

Traditional office options for solo operators today largely include open floor coworking spaces or single offices with 1, 3, or 5 desks all in one room. For the past three years, I’ve opted for the “one desk mode” in a fishbowl office in a larger shared space of other offices, which has been crucial for me to both have enough physical space to be creative and also enough privacy to take calls and zoom meetings without vying over conference room space. But this comes at the cost of collaboration: There is zero connective tissue between me and the others in the office. We never have a reason to talk, to cowork, or even enough space to sit together and cowork if we wanted.

This worked for me for awhile. But over the summer, I started collaborating more with a couple of people — both to build apps and activate my go-to-market efforts around my AI workshops business. I found that finding a place to get work done (even just one other person) for long stretches of time felt like finding a couch to crash on in a city you’re visiting for the first time. The emotional load of switching from coworking space to coworking space and cafe to cafe is a logistical nightmare.

Another added complication is the way we make things today is dramatically changing. Back in the day, it used to be good enough for sales people to have an open office plan and take calls and feed off the energy of each other — and for engineers to be tucked away in to quiet back corners where they can get their deep work done.

Not anymore. Now, we are all generalists. I’m in a 3-hour app building deep dive in Claude Code in the morning, and I’m taking sales calls with prospective clients all afternoon. The context switching of my own operating mode changes by the day, if not by the hour.

Additionally, prolific use of AI voice agents in how we build and in testing the software means it can always feel like there are more voices in a single small contained space. At one point, a friend and I tried to cowork from a cafe together but between the two of us speaking, voice-to-text mode for building software, and the app we made talking back out loud to us, the entire scene felt more like a sitcom episode to anyone around.

(Not to mention that this was incredibly annoying to anyone within earshot.)

In other words: Working alone all the time is not good enough. Being crammed in a room with other people all the time is not good enough.

I’ve been writing about this problem a lot over the past year. I’ve considered everything from hybrid co-creation spaces to schools as incubators and even intergenerational hubs.

Some of the areas I’d be most excited to explore (both for myself and collaborators) include:

• Hybrid studios: Spaces designed like artist studios (or even recording studios) but modular enough for teaching, app demos, or collaborative sprints.

• Neighborhood labs: Localized, walkable build zones that replace coworking with micro-communities. (These could be in empty storefronts or even at schools.)

• Fluid environments: Memberships that adapt to your creative cycle (solo → collab → record → rest).

Every time I post about this on problem on social media, I see many people chime in on their shared experience of this pain point. But of course, the people who have the most to gain from this problem being solved (ie: small teams and businesses) are often the least well-resourced to take it on at an economic scale that would be required to create a true “builder hub.” (And if we’ve learned anything from the last big venture injection, it’s that real estate plays do not make good venture-scale models…)

Here are a few spaces that people surfaced on my LinkedIn that seem to be taking on this art studio turned creative collective model (notably, most are in smaller markets that NYC):

• Artwork Cowork (Chicago) - a creative coworking environment exploring the space between Art and Work

• C-Space (Berlin) - a creative hub for co-working, projects, and events

• Kreate Hub Art Studio (NYC) - coworking spaces and art studios for rent i the South Bronx

• Switchyards (various locations) - 24/7 neighborhood work clubs in a variety of cities across the country

• WOMPA (Tulsa) - a creativity compound that includes coworking, private studios, and event spaces

I’m on the hunt for collaborators who want to prototype this future in New York City. So if you’re thinking about how to turn empty storefronts, libraries, or schools into neighborhood labs for AI-era builders, give a shout.

Because if AI changed how we work, maybe it’s time our spaces caught up too.