Making things to make them

Do we need to make?

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I sat with Federico, a trader. We were joined by Michel, a barkeeper in Soho, last Saturday, grabbing dinner as friends.

Michel showed me a vibe-coded app he did for the restaurant, which researched every customer beforehand on the web to see if they can offer a personal experience of some kind - a small detail like a joke on a napkin upon serving them.

Federico, the trader, was asking if Anthropic is going to destroy humanity and if we should buy the stock if it will. It took me 45 minutes to convince him no.

“A cron task runs every night at 9pm for the next day’s reservations and sends me and the owner an email” he said, his eyes lighted up - proud of his creation. Yes, he said a “cron task”.

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Seeing Michel’s eyes light up made me think: God this is so simple it is not even impressive.

So I asked him: why did you not use something that does this already?

“Because I could make it.”

“Are you gonna launch this?” I asked with a brain wired into the valley, startups and PMF non-sense.

“What do you mean? I just use it”

“But…” I said, “This already exists.”

“yep - but this one is mine.”

Could he have just invented personal software?

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Which brings me back to “making”.

Now Michel is no inventor - nor am I. So a thought experiment:

I use a personal computer and a personal phone. Yet I do not have the wits or tools to make a phone.

If I did have the tools to make a phone, fast and easy, would I do it?

Yes!

Because it would be mine.

In tech, we have been trained to believe that most people rather lie still and would like to have things served to them. That they are dull creatures who do not understand what is going on under the hood.

That might be changing.

Personally I have been hearing way too many half-understood words from waiters, bankers, salesmen and cooks such as “cron tasks”, “Javascript backends”, and “training my AI”…

With vibe-coding, there is overwhelming proof that more and more people are creating apps and digital objects. And as software builders, we look down on them.

From Will Manidis’ Tool Shaped Objects

This is because the creation serves the act of creating itself with no useful or functional benefit (e.g. see company brains). And software was always supposed to be useful otherwise you found no product market fit and had to shut down.

You see, software used to be a tool. It still largely is. However every day now it is becoming more of a medium of communication, entertainment and satisfaction.

I believe we should celebrate the act of making, even when meaningless. Share them more frequently, collect them in our personal pages and profiles - gift them, print them and copy them.

At the end of the day, who would you be if you couldn’t make?

- Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia")

Pygmalion who sculpted a woman so well the sculpture came to life

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