You Should Be Building Something

You should be building something. It doesn’t matter if it changes the world, upends an industry, or just makes your life a tiny bit better. Maybe it’s just something that looks cool. Don’t think about the ROI, or the customers, or anything else for that matter. Just build.

You should be building something because it has never been easier to. You should also be building something because exactly nobody has the same life as you do. The specific responsibilities, skills, hardships, and struggles you deal with every day are unique to you. Maybe you stumble onto something other people find useful or fun or informative. Even better. But that shouldn’t be the reason you start.

1. AI fluency is the new computer fluency

Just as it has been a prerequisite for any white-collar job to know how to use your computer and the basic software installed on it, knowing how to get what you want from AI is the skill of the future. It’s a combination of knowing what the tools are capable of and what they aren’t (which changes daily), plus some basic psychology.

One of the skills I’m actively trying to improve in myself is the art of persuasion, sales, and social engineering. When you interact with AI, you are in the business of describing what you want clearly, creating a great specification, and communicating it cleanly. These skills come with practice: seeing what the AI spits out in relation to how you asked for it.

2. Get your time back

Every task you do throughout the day should trip a trigger in your brain: is this providing value back to me? Are you learning from it? Is it deepening a relationship? Is it pleasurable or entertaining? If none of those three are true, it probably falls into one of two buckets, and one of them is a problem.

For every task in the second bucket that you hand off to your personal AI assistant, or to software you wrote yourself, you get a little more time for the first three things.

This applies to tasks inside your job, too. The most important part of your job is interacting with other people, creating relationships, and building influence. The parts done alone in front of a computer need to be surgically targeted and automated. There’s an old rule in IT that you should never do the same thing three times. By that point it should be automated. Start thinking with that mindset.

3. You’ll be ahead of your peers

If you start building things now that address your specific problems, you will be ahead of your peers. Most people are not building personal software tools for themselves, despite what you might think by scrolling LinkedIn. The tools are getting dramatically better every month and most people are still only reading about them. Starting now puts you on the right side of a widening gap.

I got you fam. Here is what you need to do today.

Prerequisite: you own a Windows, Mac, or Linux computer. Phone is not enough.

1. Create a paid account² on either claude.ai or chatgpt.com³.
2. Download the Claude desktop app or the Codex desktop app, depending on which lab you chose. They are basically interchangeable. You’ll probably develop a preference after using one or the other⁴.
3. Describe the workflow you want to automate in as much detail as possible. Give examples. Ask the AI what the best way to accomplish it is with current tools.