Building AI tools for an audience of one
With modern AI tools just being an API call away for most developers, the bottleneck to creating entirely new, powerful experiences is no longer a lack of access to technology but a lack of human creativity, understanding of the problem space, and an inability to translate what is technically possible to user value.
As a developer in this space, it is super important to me to build tools just for myself. Tools that help me understand opportunities and limitations. You might think that building a prototype just for yourself is a waste of time. I disagree.
Every second spent on building a prototype is a second spent on understanding a problem better.
Every second spent on eyeballing a dataset is a second spent on understanding where your current approach falls short.
Every second spent on testing a new way of interaction with AI has the potential to unlock so many new things you want to try.
So start building tools for an audience of one: yourself. And who knows, maybe soon enough your team, users, or the whole world will benefit. And why not set a goal to try one new thing every day to build that experimentation muscle and the courage to try, fail, sometimes win, but most importantly continue to iterate? 💪 I can guarantee that in no time you will be going through your daily life with an entirely new lens, looking for opportunities to experiment and learn.
PS: here is an (incomplete) list of frameworks that help me build prototypes faster (in no particular order with a Python focus): Chaintlit, Shiny for Python, Nomic Atlas, Bokeh, Panel, Streamlit, gradio, …
