Why I'm Building Things That Don't Scale

"Vibe" coding never struck a chord with me.

I’ve been building tools with AI over the past six months. Mostly stuff to automate my workload, experiments to go along with my articles, and overall just some fun ideas that I wouldn’t have been able to six months ago.

Thanks to Nat Eliason’s course on app building, and months of obsessing over every trick in the “vibe coder’s” handbook, I’ve become quite comfortable deploying these mini-apps.

And yet, I haven’t monetized a single one of them. According to every piece of startup advice I've ever read, this is a complete waste of my time.

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But.

• I’ve been able to 100x the impact I have within projects

• I helped my mom create a recycling sorting app.

• I made tons of awesome-looking landing pages, just as design experiments.

• I even tested some ideas that I had wondered, “Why the hell has no one built this yet?”

All within just a couple of hours of prompting.

That seems like the opposite of wasted time to me.

These mismanaged expectations about what vibe coding should and shouldn’t be have been bothering me for a while now.

We live in an era where anyone can build almost anything, but instead of celebrating this, we've turned it into another chapter in social media’s eternal search for passive income.

I feel like we’re stuck in a loop: a promising technology emerges, early adopters explore the possibilities, and then some extractive crowd arrives promising that this new tool is the secret to financial freedom.

"What amazing things can we build?" quickly turns into "How quickly can we cash out?".

When Good Tools Get Bad Reputations

The barrier between idea and implementation is rapidly crumbling, and I mean that as more than an entrepreneurial statement.

I feel like every person who’s ever thought of an app idea, but might’ve struggled to make a business case for it, has finally been given permission to make it and figure out the specifics later.

It used to cost thousands of dollars and months of development to ship a prototype, and you had to convince someone, either an investor or a customer, to pay for it if you ever wanted to see your fully fledged idea out in the world.

And, right on cue, just as this moment was starting to look promising, "vibe coding" was hijacked by the same types of folks who had previously promised riches through other schemes. Twitter burst with threads about "How I made $50K in my first month of vibe coding" and "The vibe coding blueprint that VCs don't want you to know."

I remember complaining about the exact same phenomenon back when GPT-4 first came out, and I tried my best to showcase how this kind of greed is short-sighted and actually stops normal people from believing in these tools’ potential.

I’ve written about how culture shapes the way we develop technology before, and I feel like “vibe coding” could be different if only we stop marketing it as another ponzi and start showing everyday people how it’s not just about making shitty, hackable, SaaS.

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A couple of weeks ago, I accidentally found myself stuck in this same mindset.

I had initially set out to make 50 apps by the end of the year, and I started to feel frustrated when June began, as I hadn’t even released the first one to the public. I then had a “come to Jesus” moment and realized that voice wasn’t my own.

I’m not building these apps to get rich, or even to monetize them necessarily. The goal of this exercise is to:

• a) Make tools to free up time, and find better ways of exploring my thinking through interactive experiences

• b) Be able to continue exploring this without it feeling like a side-hustle. If I can dedicate full time to experimenting, I’ve already won.

• c) Have fun and learn more about coding while doing so.

I made a Geoguessr-style game where you connect two historical figures on a timeline through their contemporaries, I made a whole automated data pipeline for my day job that would’ve taken a whole team months to set up, I even made a mobile app to give me manageable creative tasks I can do when I struggle to get out of bed.

None of these will probably make me a penny, at least not directly. But my world is better because I made them.

When you remove the pressure to monetize everything, interesting things happen. I haven’t read Rick Rubin’s Tao Te Ching-AI rehash yet, but I assume most of what’s in there centers on something along those lines.

The Difference Between Building and Scaling

The current startup mindset usually conflates the two, assuming that anything worth building must be scalable, must be monetizable, must be venture-backable.

Some of the most valuable tools in human history were not built to scale in the modern sense. Libraries scale through replication; Wikipedia scales through distributed contribution, and open-source projects scale through community adoption. None of these have to worry about increasing stakeholder value, unless those stakeholders are the people using them.

I feel like we’re not gonna dig ourselves out of this hole by monetizing and financializing more, but rather, building tools that are easy to modify and maintain, with easy access, low dependencies, and niche approaches.

We might be entering a return to form for the internet of old.

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Stated plainly: If I ever charge for one of the tools I build, it'll be because it actually costs money to maintain, not because I think I can extract value from artificial scarcity.

I’ve toyed with the idea of leaning on open source a lot in these initial stages of my new path. Getting people excited about the idea of a tool, challenging myself to write proper documentation, and always leaving the door open if someone wants to iterate and improve upon what I’ve started.

I guess only time will tell whether I should do this. There’s a lot to consider before I even present my apps as contribution-ready.

The Conversation I'd Rather Have

People have told me all year I should be sharing this process publicly, and I do see their point.

I’ve been struggling to get a grip on our evolving world these past couple of years, and I was dubious about getting back into writing at first. It’s hard when your work revolves around making sense of an industry that’s changing now more than ever.

Every time a CEO makes a rash decision based on hype rather than commitment, my heart breaks a little.

Instead of asking "How can AI help me build a business?" I want to ask, "How can AI empower everyday people to navigate uncertainty?" Instead of optimizing for scale, I want to optimize for delight. Instead of building for markets, I want to build for people.

Because I think we're at an interesting moment. We have tools that can democratize creation like never before, that could let more people build more things that make the world more interesting. Whether that happens depends on the values we bring to these tools and the communities we build around them.

We get to choose whether AI development becomes another mechanism for value extraction or a vehicle for human empowerment. But we only get to make that choice if we participate actively in shaping the conversation.

So I'm building things that don't scale. Things that solve real problems for real people. Things that exist because they should exist, not because they can make money.

Want to see what that looks like? I'll be sharing the process as I go.