Some examples of just-build-things-ism

The best mantra to come out of the AI era is: “You can just build things”. (So good OpenAI ripped it off for their Super Bowl ad.)

I’ve been pretty inspired to see how many people are now building all kinds of incredible tools thanks to advances in AI coding agents, even if they have no previous background in coding (see my post on Havelack.AI from a few days ago).

Here are a few more examples I’ve been following:

• Canadian journalist Alex Panetta writes about his AI-augmented workflow at A.I. For You. I first came across his work with his debut article “I killed my doomscrolling habit with AI. You can too”. In it, he explains how to vibe code an automated, personalized daily news digest. I’ve tried to build something for myself but I haven’t gotten it quite right yet. A great follow for big news consumers.
• Economics professor Scott Cunningham, author of the great textbook Causal Inference: The Mixtape, has a presentation explaining how to encourage AI adoption among academic faculty. This starts with faculty experiencing a killer use case for AI, which he suggests is building slide decks. He shares his tools/agent skills for this use case and more on GitHub.
• Another economist, Chris Blattman, built a website to share the productivity tools he developed with Claude Code. He provides a tutorial and code on Claude Blattman.

And of course, Simon Willison has been building and sharing tools habitually for years now.