Anyone Can Build now With AI
With a Fun Example
Welcome to Wonderings & Wanderings by Will Reynoir. If you want to get these wonderings from this struggling blogger straight to your inbox, subscribe for free and join the 42 other people following along!
Hey everyone! I hope you’ve had a maddening weekend. I don’t mean that I hoped you had a terrible weekend, or spent an egregious amount of time playing the Madden video game, but rather watched as many of the March Madness tournament games as you possibly could. While I don’t think any first tournament weekend will be as crazy as last year’s (which I spent a whole intro talking about a year ago). I’ve spent an insane amount of time watching these games at home, out in NYC, etc. so here are some of the best storylines in the tournament so far:
Ivy League Champs Yale upset Auburn (I typically don’t root for Ivy’s to do well in anything…but March Madness is an exception):
Future accountant knocks out Kentucky with 10 threes in one game:
NC State has the most electric player in Men’s Basketball in DJ Burn’s Jr. (and they won an exciting 2OT game to go to the Sweet 16, and Grayson won his bet):
By the time this blog comes out, the Sweet 16 is either about to start (which means you should be gearing up for it) or has already started (which means you should probably stop reading this blog and go watch some basketball). Regardless, March Madness is always one of the most fun times every sports calendar year as we can cheer for schools we’ve never heard of, players that will be etched into college basketball history, and upsets that make the impossible seem natural. I’ve been saying I need to write it (and I will), but times like these make me just want to drop whatever topic I plan on writing about and just write a blog solely dedicated to sports and why they are so awesome. On that note, let’s dive into today’s blog!
Anyone Can Build Now
I don’t know what TV shows y’all grew up with when y’all were younger, but one of my favorites (mostly due to the catchy theme song), was Bob the Builder. The show is a pretty simple concept overall; it’s just a dude named Bob who builds things. As a foolish little 5-year-old, I absolutely loved him and thought his power and ability to just build whatever he had to, no matter the circumstances, made him awesome.
Fast forward a couple of decades, when I like to think I have a decent view of how the world works (although I know in ten years I’ll think this is a stupid take), and Bob honestly fits right in. Why? It’s because the people who build and create things are the ones who dictate and shape how the world works around us. While some may disagree (*cough* self-obsessed politicians *cough*), you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who has shaped our world today more than entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, & Jeff Bezos who helped make the internet, smartphones, and 2-day free shipping possible. They made it possible to use a global information/communication system on a hand-sized computer in your pocket to buy an Air Fryer that will arrive at your doorstep within 24-48 hours. Think about how crazy that would sound just a couple of decades ago.
There are many other examples of people who have helped shape the world through building as well, many of which are not and will never be household names. However, these builders make up an incredibly small number of the overall population and deserve tons of praise and admiration for their work (and I mean excruciatingly hard work) of having an idea and executing it. However, out of the 6,200 thoughts each of us has every day, think of how many spectacular, world-changing ideas have gone to waste due to the other 99.9% of people who do not have the technical ability (and I’m talking only ability…drive is something else entirely) to create whatever idea they had.
With the recent developments in AI, this paradigm is about to flip on its head. With AI, the barrier to entry in any new skill or field is now significantly decreased as those who know how to interact with AI can now become good software developers, digital artists, data analysts, and more. Thus, anyone who has a cool idea now can just start cracking on that idea right away instead of taking months or years to develop the set of skills or find a team to start building said idea. As I’ve written about previously, AI allows everyone to become a sort of Renaissance Man.
While Chat GPT is remarkably good at doing a wide variety of tasks, there are an increasing number of specific AI applications that are popping up that allow anyone to operate at a high level in the specific field the application is targeting. As an example, Cognition Labs (whose founder is a math genius…literally) just released a demo of their first product Devin which enables people to generate text into code incredibly seamlessly while showing the product your code produces, making it incredibly easy to iterate and change on the fly.
A Fun Example
Now…I know it’s a lot easier to say that anyone can do this than actually doing it. So, to help prove my point, I decided to build something of my own. But before I show you what it is, I’ll provide a little context. So sometime while I was in Charleston & Savannah during my travels last year (shoutout to my friends who let me stay at their house and on their floor), I started making a list of what I call fun questions, but what are commonly referred to as ice breakers. This idea spawned out of a friend from the White House (shoutout Chris), but has proved to be incredibly helpful when meeting new people on the road and here in NYC. I’ve continually added to the list for months and months now to where it has become quite extensive, to say the least (can find the list for yourself here).
It hit me one day that instead of having to open up the list and try to pick from the vast number of questions that I have, I could instead make an app/website that will generate a question every time you tap/click a button as a way to both learn a little coding, but also test how effective these AI systems are. So I decided to give it a crack. Here is what I did:
First, I simply provided the AI with a general idea of what I wanted to build and next asked it to provide me with an MVP (minimum viable product) for this idea. With just two prompts, here is what the AI provided me with:
From just two prompts, I have Chat GPT providing me, someone with little to no coding experience, actual code that I can run on my laptop to create an application I randomly thought about in my head. Now…the application was far from what I had in mind when I first opened it, with the app displaying two buttons to click instead of one, so I just made a small request, and it changed only the part of the code I asked for.
And just like that, I had a functioning app that would generate a question every time I clicked a button. Now, I wanted to take it one step further and spice it up visually so it wasn’t just a boring plain white background with a button and a text box:
And sure enough…the code made the app with an icy blue colored background and a blue button to generate questions. I wanted to take it one step further and even add animations in the background by asking it to add falling snowflakes. It added them with one prompt and with just a little more prompting, I was even able to make sure the snowflakes fell behind the button and the question displayed instead of in front of it.
After just two hours of work and a little help from my roommate who majored in computer science (shoutout Spencer), I had this up and running on the internet for anyone who is looking to ask for some icebreakers with their friends!
If you want to play around with the site yourself, you can find it HERE (please ignore the URL, it’s the only one I had registered, so it was easy). I’m looking to build this out a bit more, with some additions being an option to add a question to the pool, a like and dislike feature so the website learns which questions are the best, having questions generated by Chat GPT, and more. However, I would also love any and all feedback from those reading this and especially from those who I constantly annoyed with these questions all last year.
Why Should You Build
Do I think AI will make everyone able to be the next Gates, Jobs, or Bezoz…absolutely not! However, just pursuing creative endeavors for the sake of doing so will have a lot of positive externalities whether or not you decide to create your own company one day or decide to stick with the employee route. The stats back it up.
94% of hiring managers say it is important to consider creativity when hiring a candidate
Creative thinking is the 2nd most important skill of 2023 and the top skill on the rise according to the World Economic Forum (I normally don’t agree with them, but on this I do)
94% of hiring managers say it is important to consider creativity when hiring a job candidate
I could go on and on with more and more stats about this, but the proof is in the pudding: being creative and building things has its perks.
So, I implore you to spend some time this Easter weekend (aside from all the bunny rabbit festivities) to embrace your creative potential in some way shape, or form. I encourage you to do it with AI too as it can help expedite the process incredibly quickly. Here’s a solid list of AI tools you can play around with, but for beginners, I recommend starting with something like Chat GPT which is pretty general purpose and can help with a lot of the functions you may be looking for, especially with the GPT store. Remember, as many famous people have said (and maybe tried to pawn it off as their own), it’s all about the journey, not the destination.
Thanks for reading! This is a pretty quick blog that I threw together very last minute, so hopefully you still enjoy it and don’t unsubscribe, lol. For those who celebrate, I hope you have a wonderful Easter weekend, and be on the lookout for the next blog that I hope to drop on time next week on Wednesday (although the chocolate rabbits might make me too sick to do so).
Click the links below if you dare:
Email: wreynoir@gmail.com