I’ve built 8 apps in the past 6 weeks

And I don't even know how to code

There is a revolution happening right now.

At the very front lines, things are pretty insane, new tools, frameworks and lines of attack open every day. Entire workflows and production lines are flipped on their head weekly. The very fabric and nature of knowledge work is being rewritten at the speed of algorithm.

But at the back of the class, things are still chilled. In some spaces, there are hushed whispers of a coming rumbling, but really, most people are mostly oblivious or living like everything is business as usual.

I have used AI for about a year now. I will admit I was hesitant, the earlier use cases were not very inspiring, the ethics were dodgy. Was this a real tool, or just some other hype train thing that Big Tech was bent on making a thing? They have been flailing for a real win, a real life changing, paradigm leap forward. From the crypto to the metaverse to NFTs, now AI…was this it?

At first, I mostly used it as a glorified ‘ipsum lorem’ generator for website builds.

But it was over conversations with a friend over Christmas, last year that started the second wave of my journey. He casually mentioned that he used AI for everything, he even showed me some rudimentary apps he had made.

I shrugged it off, but eventually, I got curious. What if I actively used AI to solve problems, or build things?

I needed a proper notion dashboard for my business - something I could use to track my numbers, keep track of deals, open projects, client meetings, content, all of it.

So, I tried first, got stuck and then told ChatGPT what I was trying to do, sent some screenshots and in a few minutes, we had mapped out what I needed to do, and I spent the afternoon building it out. Soon enough, I had my dashboard.

Hmm…interesting.

I fed it another idea I had - automating my brand workshops.

I had an idea of how I wanted to make it work, it gave me a workflow, I took it and went off to build. I spent a day struggling and fussing, but couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted, and the AI kept not giving me the solution I needed, so I left it.

I used it to work through some brand clarity issues, create a content plan and solve some small problems. It was helpful, but too focused on its own paths. Every time I used it to write, it sounded more like itself than me. And sure it showed me how to build things, but it itself couldn’t do much.

Then I met Claude. I fed it my idea for the automated workshop. It asked me a few questions.

And then it just built it.

It didn’t give me a long list of things to do. I didn’t need to learn new technologies, or go do further research. It just made the thing I asked for.

That was the first mind-blowing thing. Over hours of prompting back and forth, I had a working prototype of my idea. It was a real thing, that worked just the way I imagined it should. Over the next week, I kept prompting, adding features, adjusting the layout.

Eventually, I took the UI, put it in Figma and explored design options until I found one I liked, threw it back to Claude and it coded my project pixel perfect.

Incredible.

The next week was mostly ideation, bouncing concepts back and forth, putting my brand through my workshop, pushing the answers into Claude, refining, creating reference sheets and brand guides, giving Claude even more context. A process of iterative refinement.

Every time I would log on to X, I’d see even more use cases and projects, and workflows. People were actively experimenting and documenting, pushing the boundaries of what we thought was possible.

A new way of working was literally being born. For the first time, a lot of ideas were possible, at the very least, we could take them from static designs and interactive prototypes to actually real, deployable products.

The tasks that always took too long, the steps that were tedious, the bottlenecks…here were emerging the tools, frameworks and workflows to fix all that.

I realised that my tech stack was obsolete. Sure, it is still working now - the Office Suite, the Adobe Suite, all the management, note taking, communication tools.

But in truth, everything was free game, everything was subject to change. The hot new design workflows on the block are not in Adobe, they are in Figma, and Framer, and Claude and Stitch and Nano Banana. There will be even more new names tomorrow.

These tools take skills that were hard to access and democratise them.

For the beginners and the unskilled, it gives them a chance to enter the game, to play around with ideas, for now.

For those who are already skilled, with years in the game and hard-won experience and judgement, it makes us 10x.

If you are actually already good at what you do, AI gives you the ability to be even better.

The opportunities for leverage are insane.

Yes this is a glaze fest.

And I haven’t even gotten around to the most sublime experience I had.

Prompting through a Saturday night in March, working on my ever expanding list of ideas, I decided to feed Claude my personal website. Look at all 200+ of my blog posts and analyse and give feedback.

The rest of that day was almost a spiritual experience. It went through all my writing and in less than 3 minutes had given me a full breakdown. It pointed out my best writing and my weakest, it led me down a path that felt truly cathartic, helping me process something about my writing that had never quite been articulated before.

Sure, I might be microdosing on AI psychosis.

I mean I am aware about how ‘weird’ it is to feel strongly about something that isn’t…alive.

But it fulfilled a real need, it gave real value, it made me more confident in my peculiar style of writing, in what makes me me.

In all of this, I have come to understand something that I have hinted about throughout this piece, and something I touched on at the beginning.

The world is changing. In more profound ways than people realise. I might be being hyperbolic, but it is what I truly believe. AI is beyond AI slop. There is definitely low quality AI output and tools and products, sure. There is also slop of everything.

But for the creators, the generalists, the combinators, the one-man armies, there is a whole paradigm shift of work that is happening, a whole generation of tools and workflows that are emerging, that fundamentally change what is possible.

And if you are not actively experimenting and seeing what works best for you, and trying out not just new tools, but new ways of thinking about and approaching work, then you will be fundamentally unprepared for the world that is to come.

That is what I see happening.

There are some key ideas I will leave you with, ways I am thinking about AI and how I am making my own way forward…

If the computer was a bicycle for the mind, AI is a motorbike.

The computer allowed us to do so much more, store more information, manipulate it more, create more. AI will allow us to do even more, faster. AI is a tool, a very powerful one, but It still needs a mind to steer it.

Work used to be about doing the work. Now it is more about directing the work.

You have to have a meta approach to work. You need to not just do the work, you need to understand the work you are doing, what its value is, where it plugs into, and the workflows you use to get them done.

You have to think in systems and workflows

This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about work or life than most people do. Most people just do things, they don’t often apply a meta abstraction to what they do. But this is a core skill everyone needs to have now. When you understand your workflows and systems, you are first of all able to design them better, before even applying technology.

With this understanding, you can streamline it even further with AI, or replace some parts of the workflow or hand it off to AI completely. The point is you can supercharge the way you do things.

Experiment. Do old tasks with new tools

These days, I try things a lot. I try to build a whole website with Claude instead of Wordpress and Divi. Instead of defaulting to Illustrator for design, I try Figma instead. Instead of building a whole presentation from scratch with Powerpoint, I try out Canva.

I am often slower, I often have to revert back to old tools for certain things. But I am shaking things up, understanding the tools that are available and thinking about my work and workflow in new ways.

Just this morning (of writing this), a client woke me up, he needed an excel quote designed into a branded pdf one.

Now, usually, I would have opened up Excel, edited the tables in there, or created a word document, and imported all the information in, and redesigned the whole document to fit the brand.

Instead, I fired up Claude, asked it to convert the document to PDF based on the brand look and feel. A few prompts later, and a quick sample design in illustrator to show it exactly the visual layout I wanted, we had it done. A successful client project, using new tools and workflows.

This morning I have been experimenting with Wispr, trying out its dictation capabilities.

Document, Iterate

An interesting effect to notice has been this iterative, self referential aspect to the process.

I work with AI (mostly Claude) to better understand myself, my processes, my positioning. I document it with AI, and then feed it back to AI. We improve, we refine. We inject in ideas from other places, fields, experts. I define myself again, document it and feed it back to AI. On and on. We keep shifting and evolving and becoming even clearer.

The documentation helps the AI to remember, and it shows me a documentation of how far I have come. With this focused iterative process, I do feel I am growing much faster than I used to. I mean just my studio homepage has changed at least 7 times since the year started.

Build your own tools

In the past 6 weeks, I have built about 8 apps. 4 of them based around my thesis on brand and brand building, the rest as internal tools to help me understand and run my business better. Each of them uniquely tailored to my situation and needs. Each of them opening up new ways of working and creating. This new wave of technology allows us to create things that commercial software couldn’t. Tools that are truly customised to us.

These are exciting times we live in. A whole new emerging world of knowledge work powered by AI. Things have been changing quickly, there is a lot of uncertainty and dangers to navigate. But there is also a lot of opportunities if you are willing to seek them out and embrace change.

Let’s keep building.