I know I might lose my engineering job because of it, but so far AI has unlocked an amazing period of creative output for me. Projects that have been bouncing around my noggin for years, but I never considered myself smart enough or ambitious enough to truly pursue, I now attempt with Cursor/Windsurf/Newest toy and find that it actually takes two hours to make a working prototype.
I always consider myself a lazy creative type; full of ideas, but not the willpower needed to execute them. No more. Since I've been using these tools, I've managed to make quite a few very interesting things that I'm really happy I made, and my ambition is only increasing. I'm going to dust off some ideas I was sure were just around the corner 10 years ago, but for some reason I can't see any incarnations yet.
Things I've made in the last few months:
tuner.vester.si
Learning instruments is hard, I know nothing of music theory. But I do know that a realtime feedback loop can help my brain construct a model around sound, and what is correct, and teach me to recognize notes.
So I made this tuner (currently calibrated for an alto saxophone).
It's just javascript, using AubioJS to process the microphone input and draw it into a canvas.
Making realtime visualisations is something I've always been really interested in, but it's always been a bit daunting, because of all the work of drawing and keeping state in a sensible way is so different from my day-to-day coding involving servers and databases... Being able to describe the rough outline of an idea and the code just appearing is such a nice feeling.
Want other instruments available, or some other feature? Contact me, I'm eager for feedback.
motion.vester.si
I'm a dancer, and I think about how software could improve learning dance. Years ago I saw a video about a simple motion detection method, diffing two grayscaled video frames, and displaying white pixels only where the difference is above a threshold. I said to myself maybe one day I'll know enough about ffmpeg... or opencv..., and then someone will compile those down to wasm or something, and then I'll make the same diffing thing in the browser somehow.
Well, WebGPU is here (more or less), and I just made the whole working prototype in an evening.
I still need to learn more about WebGPU, shaders, bindgroups, and all these new words, but having a conversation with the AI sure beats googling.
(Want to see a feature on motion? Let me know. I'd also love to talk to someone who knows a lot about WebGPU, I want to add several more features to it and I need to learn which questions to ask).
A language learning app
I think this could easily be the AI version of a Hello World app. So many different approaches are possible (sound only? No sound, just text? Clone you own language to hear yourself speak a foreign tongue? Should you learn writting as well as speech? Why? Why not just speech? All of these are fun to pursue).
What this taught me is that if you can use AI to generate 95% of the content of your app, what are you actually supposed to store in your database, and how will it enhance the user experience over time?
(I can't show this one since you'll burn my €€€ for the generative parts, but I'm quite happy with it, and so are a few friends).
This blog
So, I have, as a best guess, about 200 draft blog posts I've written in the last 10 years. I've never pubished anything. I don't know why. But all the release cadence around the other projects I made suddenly made me think maybe having a blog on the server wouldn't hurt. Let's see if I'm wrong.
In fact, this whole server
Fine, I'm an engineer and I didn't have my own server, maybe I should lose my license. But I got a little thing on hetzner then made scripts to deploy all of these projects automatically, and create certificates for all of them, and it's all automatic, and it makes me happy.
So
To sum it all up... It's soooo much harder to be lazy now. The activation energy is so much lower, because for me activation energy used to be the quantity of conviction needed to spend a whole weekend figuring out how to figure out how to make something, and now it's mostly just spending 2 minutes thinking of the UX, and then chatting with the AI about it.
I'm fortunate that I know a lot of the phrases that steer the AI into good directions quickly, but clearly I'm no genius.
It's just a great time to have ideas.