On making one's own environment
First, an update on my vibecoding agentic engineering journey:
- I'm making approximately one new webapp per day, slightly more over the last week.1
- Not all of these succeed, but many of them do, and I use several daily or near-daily.
- These projects then improve my bootstrapper, and I'm getting quicker over time.
This is nowhere near maximum efficiency or velocity, but it's the right approach for me (I think!) right now. I'm pushing myself hard enough to be building new cognitive and mechanical skills, and building up piecemeal is (for me, for now) the best way to get better.
We hear a lot about how fun, scary, or strange it is to be building with AI. I'm also struck by how it feels to have built with AI: that is, to have more and more of my daily life mediated not just by software but by software that I built. I've long been a very heavy user of my own spaced repetition software, but I'm now also tracking my daily goals, reading queue, and more with little bespoke apps. In a slogan: many of my spreadsheets should be custom webapps, and many things that are not spreadsheets should also be custom webapps.
A few notes:
- The obvious prediction to make is that there's a bimodal distribution coming with respect to complexity and feature-density. I don't plan to replace Gmail, iTerm, or Drafts any time soon, but I'm on the way toward self-built substitutes for many of the small- and medium-sized applications in my life.
- ...unless connections grow between and among my little tools, that is. I'm already thinking about integrations between book-tracking and daily-goal-tracking.
- My digital life is faster. You don't need to be a performance engineer to make small AWS-backed apps snappy.
- The speed, combined with the lack of third-party tracking and advertising, makes me feel calm and happy.
I can't know how much of my near- and far-future digital world will be of my own creation. For now, though, the made-by-me rate is growing quickly, and my experience of not just making but using software has changed, probably forever.
For whatever it's worth, I'm not optimizing for number of new projects, and this is only during spare time.↩