What deserves to exist
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Read time: 4 mins Hi Reader, I feel like, for the first time, the gap between having an idea and holding the real thing in your hands has almost closed. You think of something on the walk to buy milk, and by the evening it exists. It's live online, and someone you've never met is using it. That's what vibe coding unlocks. The collapse of the distance between idea and object. And almost nobody is using it for that. Most people have pointed AI at the safe end of the work. Validating ideas. Drafting captions. Tidying a calendar. Summarising documents. Useful, sure. Also the part a thousand other people are automating in the same way this morning. The interesting end is the other one. The building. From the experts Building has stopped being the bottleneck. What took weeks now takes an afternoon, and you can't opt out of that. — Max Buckley, ex-Google, now at Exa. The floor moved while most people were still asking permission. Creation got cheap. Ownership got expensive. The new skill is knowing what not to build. — Jimmy Lai, Vercel. Anyone can start something now. Few think about who maintains it. Taste isn't a checklist. It's understanding why something works, then using that somewhere new. — Phil Hedayatnia, Airfoil. The one thing you still can't hand to the machine. I saw this recently and can't get it out of my head: AI looks back at the data. You look forward at the idea. It executes whatever you point it toward. Two things I built recently, both from a standing start. The first is a self-assessment: which player in the England squad are you? It sounds like a toy. It works because people love a self-assessment. People love the World Cup (well, maybe not in Manresa. You wouldn't have known Spain were playing on Monday afternoon), so it didn't feel like marketing to make, and it doesn't feel like marketing to take. The second is Ombra, a shade map of Manresa's parks. Where the shadow falls at 4pm in June, so you know which park to take the kids to. One of my content principles is "Live first, create later" and this is a perfect example. This wouldn't be a thing if I didn't have a toddler presenting a careful argument on why we should go to the park at the worst time of day in the middle of an unexpected heatwave. It's been used by more than 400 people online, and not because I optimised it for anything. Maybe we love a map to show us what we already know (there aren't enough green spaces in town), or maybe 400 toddlers also presented strong cases to their parents... What was once a technical barrier is now a conversation with a tool. When anyone can make anything, the only question left is whether it should exist. Both of these earned their place before I wrote a line: the assessment because it could bring in leads, Ombra because a parent in July genuinely needs to know where the shade is. The afternoon is free now. The judgement about what's worth the afternoon is the whole job. So don't ask what you could build in an afternoon. Ask what deserves to exist that doesn't yet. Escape the algorithm Tool: Terraink. For map nerds like me. Turn locations into minimalist posters. Article: Gatekeeping is back, but different. Missing out used to be the worst thing that could happen to you online, but what happens when missing out is better than being apart? A hidden gem goes viral. Brands find something real, touch it, and kill it. So the people and masses stop going and sharing. For a long time, we didn't like gatekeepers. Maybe we need them. Video: You're not crazy, everyone sounds like ChatGPT. ChatGPT writes the sme way every time (whether you know it or not) it's starting to impact our cadence. The contrast framing, the rules of three where two of the three mean nothing. The vulnerability "and honestly? let's be real." AI took this from actual human text and speech, to the point where we can't use these phrases without getting accused of using AI. If anyone can prototype an idea, attention is now a scarce resource. That also means I should say a thank you, Reader. Your attention is not free, and I hope I made this piece worth your time. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here. See you soon. Peace, Has
If something in this issue sparked a thought about your own content, I'm easy to reach. Tell me what you're trying to achieve. |
