Saturday Sessions: What Should I Build?

Happy Weekend! And Spring! Pretty much anyway!

Last week I asked you “what’s stopping you from building with AI?”

Lots of responses but one dominated:

WHAT should you build? It’s a great question honestly.

Today we fix this.

First up, here’s what you should not build:

@iamkylebalmer

Stop trying to build your dream app on day one. That's why people quit. Build a calculator first. See it work. Then the real ideas come. ... See more

Do not build your dream app as your first project. Do not try to build a $10,000/month project from the get go.

Could you? Sure. But I don’t recommend it.

The reason is (frankly) that your first project will be crap.

It's the first time you’ve built something. Of course it’ll be crap. Everything is crap the first time! And that’s fine.

But unfortunately in vibe coding or building with AI in general this is what most courses and most people recommend. Time to break free and make your fortune.

Yes yes we can get to that. But first you need to cut your teeth with vibe coding.

Start with a toy project. Something small and doable. Then something a little more complex. Then a little more. And so on and so on.

Don’t try to make money or retire using your first project. It’ll just be frustrating. That’ll come later!

So, I highly recommend carving out an hour or so today and heading to https://aistudio.google.com/apps to build your first project.

That link is to Google’s free vibe coding tool. It’s more than enough to get started.

Head there and copy in this prompt:

"Build a multiplayer-ready trivia game about [add your topic here]. 20 questions, score tracking, animations between questions, confetti on completion, and a leaderboard. Make it feel like a polished mobile app. No login required but ability to add name for highscore.”

This will create a fully functioning multiplayer quiz like this one that tests your AI knowledge and history:

Creating something like this before would have taken hours if not days. Oh, and you’d need to know how to code as well Now? 60 seconds or so.

FYI: I’ve set this one so it doesn’t require email. But you could set yours up with user sign up just as easily (remove no login required) if you wanted to create something like this for email capture.

Now that you’ve built something (just by copying in my prompt) you can see hopefully you see how powerful this is.

Go and build more things. Play around. Experiment.

Got an idea on your todo list? Stick it in and see what happens.

Just get started.

Again, go use https://aistudio.google.com/apps (free) and plug in that prompt. Then play around and build more. Go have fun. Don’t overcomplicate. That’s it for today!