Build something silly

Matt Shumer’s Something Big is Happening has been making the rounds this week. If you haven’t read it, it’s a 5,000-word letter to non-tech friends and family about what AI is doing to the world right now. Some of it is hyperbolic. Some of it feels like the “learn to code” advice of 2020 — confident about a future that hasn’t happened yet. But the core message is right: if you’re not experimenting with these tools, you’re falling behind.

Where I think Shumer’s post is most useful is in its advice to non-technical people. Not the doomsday stuff. The practical stuff. Stop treating AI like a search engine. Push it into your actual work. See what happens.

I’d take it one step further. Don’t just use AI. Build something with it.

I can’t code

Let me be clear about something. I’m not a developer. I did some coding early in my career, but that was at the end of the 20th century. We’re talking Geocities-era HTML. For the past 25 years, every time I needed something built, I hired someone.

That changed last year. I rebuilt my entire website using Cursor and Claude. No developer. Just me, prompting my way through it. It’s not rocket science, but it’s not nothing either — it’s a real site with a blog, newsletter integration, RSS feed, the whole thing.

That experience opened a door I didn’t expect.

From $11/month to free

I’d been a Harvest customer for about ten years. It handled time tracking and invoicing. It was fine. But when I returned to consulting recently, I asked myself a question I’d never considered before: do I actually need this?

I tried Midday.ai, which has some clever features. But paying $29/month for someone who sends one or two invoices a month didn’t make financial sense. So I did what I think anyone in this position should at least consider doing — I started building my own tool.

It wasn’t that complicated, mainly because I knew exactly what I needed. Import my clients and invoices from Harvest. Create new invoices connected to a client. Generate PDFs I could send. That’s it. No features I’d never use. No settings I had to ignore. Just exactly what I needed. And it was done in less than two days.

Then something clicked

For the first couple of weeks, my tool worked like any other invoicing app. Click to create a client. Click to create a project. Fill out details. Click Save. It followed the same patterns I’d been trained on by a decade of SaaS products.

Then it hit me — I was building software that lived by old rules. Rules designed for generic tools that serve thousands of users. But this tool serves exactly one user. Me.

So I changed it. Now, instead of manually entering client details, I upload a signed contract and let AI parse it — mapping it to an existing client or creating a new one, extracting the scope, payment terms, duration, everything. It creates my own vault of documents. I added an AI chat where I can ask things like “draft an invoice for unbilled time on Project X” or “what’s the total amount invoiced to Client Y this year?” or “what does my availability look like in April?”

None of this is rocket science. But it’s mine. It does exactly what I need and nothing else.

This isn’t just about me

Wall Street has noticed this shift too. A few weeks ago, SaaS stocks lost $285 billion in value after Anthropic released new AI tools. Traders are calling it the “SaaSpocalypse.” The fear is simple: if people can build their own tools, why would they keep paying for generic ones?

That’s probably overblown for enterprise software. Nobody’s replacing Salesforce with a weekend project. But for individuals and small businesses? The math is changing fast.

My friend Elan Miller recently launched a competitive brand audit tool — a way for anyone to analyze how their brand voice compares to competitors. He’s a brand strategist, not a developer. A year ago, building something like that would have meant hiring an agency. Now it’s something one person can ship.

This is where Shumer is right and where it gets exciting. Not the “your job is going to disappear” part. The part where regular people — designers, consultants, strategists, teachers, whoever — can build tools that are perfectly shaped for their specific needs.

The mindset shift matters more than the tool

Here’s what I think is actually important about all of this. It’s not the invoicing tool. It’s not my website. It’s the shift in thinking.

For decades, the default response to any problem was “what software should I subscribe to?” We browsed Product Hunt. We compared pricing pages. We squeezed our workflows into someone else’s idea of how things should work.

What if the default question became “could I build something myself?”

Not always. Not for everything. But as a first instinct instead of a last resort. That mental shift — from consumer to builder — is what I think people should be practicing right now.

And the only way to develop it is to start small. Build something silly. Build a tool that tracks your dog’s meals. Build a dashboard for your book club. Build an invoicing tool because you’re tired of paying $11/month for features you don’t use.

The point isn’t the tool. The point is the muscle. Once you’ve built one thing, you start seeing opportunities everywhere. You stop asking “is there an app for that?” and start asking “what if I just made it?”

That’s the real takeaway from this moment. Not that AI is going to eat the world. But that for the first time, building software isn’t reserved for people who know how to code. And the people who figure that out early — not by reading about it, but by doing it — will have a significant advantage.

Yuval Noah Harari was asked a few years ago what the most important skill for the coming decades would be. His answer wasn’t coding. It wasn’t AI literacy. It was adaptability.

“The most important skills for surviving and flourishing in the 21st century are not specific skills. Instead, the really important skill is how to master new skills again and again throughout your life.”

Building something silly is how you practice that. Not because the tool matters, but because the act of building rewires how you think. You stop being a passive consumer of software and start being someone who shapes their own tools. That’s adaptability in action.

So build something. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be useful to anyone but you. Just build it.