Are you building enough silly apps for your life using AI?

Probably not...

More posts in the vein of using AI to do stuff this week… We just finished “PM Vibe Coding Week” at work, so this is even more on top of my mind than usual.

I’m guessing you’re not building enough silly/unnecessary apps.

Let me explain. Most of the press/public attention with AI today is spent on seeing if it can do jobs or replace software that does jobs that are economically important, but the largest opportunities may actually be (cumulatively) in the jobs that were never important enough to receive attention.

Lots of people have talked about how you can now use AI to build that personal tool at work that otherwise would never have been built or that internal system that would have been impossible to prioritize if it weren’t just so easy to now finally get done. I do believe the cumulative effect of all of that would ladder up to something truly remarkable. But I’ve found that the impact on your personal life could be even higher.

I’ve been using GenAI for a few different personal projects over the last couple of years, but one this weekend was a great example of things I should be doing a lot more of.

Last year, my then-7yo and I briefly got into the habit of learning really simple songs to play on the keyboard by watching YouTube piano tutorials. Something we often had to do was pause the video and write down the keys since sometimes it was easier to learn the song that way. That phase passed, but my now-8yo suddenly wanted to learn a new song (unsurprisingly from K-Pop Demon Hunters :-)) and I saw her pausing the video and complaining loudly about how they didn’t have all the letters on the screen and it was taking her so long to write down the keys.

So I wrote an app (screenshot below) quickly that given a YouTube video pulled the keys so that she wouldn’t have to do it manually.

This is the exact niche sort of thing that is not worth the effort for most people to try to solve and I didn’t have the skill to do quickly before - but doing this could mean so much in this individual case - maybe it’s the thing that makes it easier for my kid to keep playing the piano and she could go on to love it and become a concert pianist - all simply because she had this tool! What an incredible dad I’d be! Spoiler: this will likely not happen since she seem to have moved on once she learned the start of this one song. :-)

But hey, the possibility did open up! Solutions to minor problems often open up options to major gains - both at work and in your own life. So spending a little bit of time can often be hugely rewarding.

I’ll caveat this with watching out for the usual PM scope creep. I fell for thing I warn so many about. So in this case, I kept iterating on the app even after it was clear she was fine with what I’d offered her first to make it more robust and behave a little differently, and then I decided converting it to a Chrome extention was now so easy vs. earlier, I ended up doing that - all of which she may never use again for months. :-/

But in the process, I learned a lot about how different LLMs see music in YouTube videos, just how much better some tools I hadn’t used before had become, and that I shouldn’t assume that pink would be my 8yo’s preferred color for an app of this sort.

Get into the habit of building more silly, low stakes tools for yourself. It’ll pay off both directly (solving the problem you saw) and indirectly (giving you the ability and lessons to do even more).