Build for expression

What do you do when everything is easy and cheap to build? Build more? Faster? Build random stuff to see what sticks?

What it comes down to is this: there's building for capture, and there's building for expression. There's a lot of maximizing value capture out there: first-to-market, best-at-marketing, or best-product. It's permeating saturated spaces more and more. What if you take value capture off the table?

I've always liked tinkering, but I've been doing less of that in the last couple of years. Claude Code (and Cursor, and others, ...) made it possible again. I can often go from idea to working product with one or two solid plan mode sessions, and small iterations.

It's an amazing time to build for expression. With a feel for the material, seeing what works, seeing how it feels, and putting it out into the world. We're removing barriers to software making, across all functions. I do still believe that you need some baseline level of intuition and feel for what you're doing, but a lot of complication has simply been abstracted away. Making it easy to build, iterate, and ship. Even if only for expressing your ideas.

I really started going deep over my Christmas break. What previously ended up as notes in my ~/ideas folder now all of a sudden is often just a few hours of focus away. Is any of it commercial software? Hell no. At least not what I've been building so far. It's more utilitarian. I can solve my own problems. I am solving my own problems. And I'm solving my own problems at a pretty low cost, might I add.

One example started with a very simple question: "Why can't I have my Spotify Wrapped on demand?". And so it goes. mkdir spotify-visualizer, and I was off to the races. A couple of plan mode iterations later, I feel like I had something that "worked". I could upload my extended Spotify Streaming History, and get simple visualizations. Pretty cool. Now all of a sudden, I can treat it similar to flipping through my journal: "What did I listen to in 2016, when I was in university?". Answers to questions like "What was my favorite song during the COVID years?" were accessible. I have no intentions of it being a commercial enterprise. It's a utility in ways. Another one: "Why can't I compress PDFs the way I want?" mkdir pdf-compressor. Done.

I'm really just making things I want to exist. The bar is solving something I care about. It's not about product-market fit. Turns out, that just might be reason enough.

There's a lot more in the ~/ideas folder. It keeps growing. Build for expression.