Stop chatting with AI, start building

The chat interface that all of us are using right now with AI is great. It does a lot and continues to get better and better, but it doesn’t necessarily solve your problems unless your problem is I don’t know about a particular thing.

But with the rise of AI, we now also have tools like Lovable and Claude Code that allow you to actually build solutions for your problems.

And I think this is where the world is going. We’re going to be buying less and less off-the-shelf software to solve problems that we have, and more and more build one-off solutions for ourselves.

Sometimes there will be things that we build that we will continue to use for a very long time, but I also think we’re going to be building throwaway software—software that solves a single problem for a short period of time and then you get rid of it. Then later you build something new that is more aligned with what you need at that very moment.

Getting your hands dirty

Last night when I told a colleague that this is where I think the future is going, they told me “well, I don’t think I have that many problems to solve”. Which sounds like a really good position to be in, but maybe you’re simply underestimating the power of AI.

What I want to propose you to do is to actually start building something today. The best way to start building something is to play, to try out things. You don’t have to solve any big problems.

Maybe the problem that you’re trying to solve is that you want to automatically buy new coffee when it runs out, or maybe you just want to read the news in a format that perfectly suits you, or maybe you just want to keep track of your runs.

Or maybe you want to create a database of things that you have in your closets. There are many different things to build, and what I suggest you do is the following.

1. Choose an arbitrary problem. My suggestion is to create a simple database of sorts. For example tracking the food you have in house.

2. Sign up for Lovable

3. Try to build it!

It’s really that simple. What you should try to do is to get to a place where either you are unhappy, and then rather than iterating from that point, you just start fresh with what you’ve learned about how Lovable works, about how building with AI works. Or alternatively, you get to a place where you’re actually happy and then try to use the app. Try to make it useful for you. What are the decisions that you have to take to make it useful for you? How can you make it easier? How can you make it better? And maybe what you’ll realize is that you’re done and you solved the real problem for yourself. Or what often happens to me is that you realize, well, this app really didn’t need to exist, and you just tried to solve another problem.

The point isn’t that you solve a real problem right now. The point is that you get comfortable building something from scratch with these new tools.

The more practice you put in, the more you learn about how these systems work and the more you learn to solve problems differently.

And that is the skill you’ll have to develop in the world of tomorrow.

Start building!