Everyone’s a builder now
At the end of November this year, I gave another talk at Brainstation here in Vancouver. Kyle and the crew there put on a well-run event; I hope I’m invited back again!
The premise of this talk is the title of this post too; this is one of the aspects of our current generation of generative AI that I’m the most excited about: the distance from idea to shipping has never been lower, and never been more available to everyone, not just developers.
I love that you can build pretty cool software just by talking, in “normal english”, to a robot who’ll translate that into pretty good code. I’m not saying everyone can write enterprise-grade production software, but honestly, that should be the exception not the rule: /most/ people need software that “works for me”, or maybe “works for my team” and not much else. I am here for this new era of “personal software” or “solo software”.
I ended up diverting from my planned talk some, because after sharing a few of the tools I have used to publish vibe-coded work, it became apparent that while a lot of the audience had built some kind of tool, they were all “trapped” in the creator app - Copilots, Gemini, Replit, etc - they didn’t have a clear path to ship somewhere else.
So I spent a bunch of time talking about developer tools-of-the-trade, and in particular, I showed how you can just ask your AI-tool to walk you through configuring these things: Github, Cloudflare, Firebase, Supabase, Vercel, xCode, the App Store, etc.
It was a good reminder that for non-developers, there is still an actual river to cross here to get to the promised land. I don’t think it’s always required, but the fact that you can easily, freely ship an app to cloudflare, and register a domain to run it on is important. Everyone can, and should, run their work! Make the web weird again!