Building software has never been this cheap or this fast. So…

BUILD. MORE. TOOLS.

![I built this detailed visualization for a scoring system](/media/01M43PKM93ZT4EAG38C47R8ZHG/scoring-visualization.png "I built this detailed visualization for a scoring system")

*I built this detailed visualization for a scoring system*

AI can build something that works ok-ish in a couple of minutes. A couple more prompts and an hour later, you have something very usable. Spend a week tweaking it as you use it, and you’ll have a very solid tool.

That’s not true for enterprise software, not yet. But that’s not the point here.

More than that, tools have never had access to such incredible capabilities:

- Read free-form text and make sense of it? Easy!
- Extract info from virtually any digital media — text, audio, images, or some obscure data format? Bread and butter.
- Classify almost anything without training and still get acceptable results? Hello, Jev and clones!
- Create images… freaking good images (no extra fingers included), on the fly? That’s one API call away.

And tools make you very, *very* fast.

I’ve been building more and more tools, and I think I’ve reached an inflection point. My knee-jerk reaction before starting anything was, “How can I make AI do this?” Now, after I finish something, another thought is becoming increasingly frequent (and more useful): “Can I build a tool for what I just did?”

Last year, I would have said:

> *It’s faster to simply do it again than to build something to help.*

As time passes, that assertion is becoming less and less true.

So, here’s my challenge for you:

Put a Post-it on your monitor: “Two strikes, build a tool.” Then spend time building the freaking tool after you repeat a task. Your first tool will take too long to build.

Don’t stop.

Build a second one, a third, a fourth… keep doing it for a whole week.

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Pro tips:

1. **The best tools are CLI** (shell commands and scripts). They can pack a lot of work in a simple interface and agents can use them too.
2. You can build tools to help you build tools 😉