Next Generation of What?
On the 1st of March 2020 I moved to the UK, and 3 weeks later the country and much of the world went into the first COVID-19 lockdown. I was stuck in an empty London flat with a mattress, a table and two folding chairs (most of my stuff was still on a container ship from New York). I had nothing to do.
A plan lodged itself in my mind: To distract myself from the gloomy pandemic reality, I would build prototypes with some connection to the lockdown conditions. I would pick ideas off the top of my head and see how quickly I could realize them in code.
Fully absorbed, I turned out a handful of prototypes, each in under 3 days. It was the most fun I’d had writing code in a long time. I was effectively reliving a happy part of my youth, before I had all-consuming full-time jobs as a software engineer and engineering leader, when this mode of open-ended hacking constituted a large part of my life.
For a competent engineer it’s always been easy to prototype software rapidly - for themselves to run or themselves to demo to someone. The hard part is making software work for other people and their messy data. This has historically accounted for probably 90% of misalignment between management and engineering. It’s tough to see a demo and then be told that it’s weeks or months out from shipping to users.
But it’s 5 years on from my pandemic hacking. In a new era of AI assistants and vibe coding these ancient rules have been overturned. A single engineer can push a prototype beyond demoable to usable and shippable faster than ever. I think? The tools are evolving so quickly that it’s hard to say where exactly we stand right now.
This Substack explores the state of the art in prototyping, AI assistants and vibe coding. It will document a series of quick apps, hacks, experiments that I produce in real-time, with the important stipulation that they must result in something for you - the hapless user - to play with.
Subscribe now! You will get a fresh hack with commentary in your inbox roughly every 2 weeks. Say hi if you feel inspired.
—Nik
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