You need more tools
Building software has never been this cheap or this fast. So…
BUILD. MORE. TOOLS.
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.
Pro tips:
- 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.
- You can build tools to help you build tools 😉