An illustration showing a hand holding a smartphone with its camera app open, capturing an image of a cartoon purple cat. The camera screen displays the cat framed with a square outline, and several facial features—such as the eyes, ears, and nose—are highlighted with smaller boxes and connected by thin lines, illustrating an AI recognition process. The cat is slightly blurred in the background outside the phone screen, emphasising the focus on the camera's view.

After some success ‘vibe coding’ both Album Shelf and a digital credentials issuing platform called Badge to the Future, I’ve run a couple of sessions called ‘F*ck Around and Find Out’ relating to AI. I also knocked up a career discovery tool.

I’m sharing all of these links because I think people should be experimenting with generative AI to see what it can do and where the ‘edges’ are. I said as much when recording a episode for Helen Beetham’s imperfect offerings podcast which I’m hoping will come out soon.

Discussing some of this on the All Tech is Human Slack, Noelia Amoedo shared this post from her blog. After experimenting with other tools, she like me has settled on Lovable. I used the $50/month tier last month as I ran out of prompts on the $20/month level. You do get some for free.

What I think is explicit in Noelia’s post is the potential decentralisation of power this enables. What is implicit is that it takes curiosity to do this. As I signed off Helen’s podcast as saying (spoiler alert!) “my experience has been that most people are intellectually lazy, extremely uncurious, and want to take something off the shelf, implement it without too much thought, and be considered ‘innovative’ for doing so.”

You might say that being “intellectually lazy” is using AI. But I disagree. So long as you’re not just getting it to answer an essay question or come up with a some trite, fascist-adjacent imagery, then interacting with it involves choice (which model? what prompt?) and creativity.

I settled on Lovable, a Swedish company. The fact that they were European may have influenced my decision… or did I realize that later? I did subscribe, but only for a month (I seem to have learned to moderate my impulses just a bit). I took advantage of a business trip to write the code for my website, and I worked on it between meetings over two days. It must have taken about four or five hours overall, but it could have been done in one or two hours if the content had been ready when I started. It is possibly longer than what it would have taken with WordPress, I admit, but it gave me so much flexibility! I also own the code and I can take it anywhere. I did have to figure out some “techy” things, like how to turn the JavaScript7 code into something that I could upload to my hosting service, but Lovable was right there to provide any instructions I needed, and I have to confess I enjoyed bossing him (it!!!) around to change things here or there.

Asking for something in your own words and getting it done instantly almost feels like magic, just as graphical user interfaces felt magical when we were used to command lines. And if graphical user interfaces opened the digital world to so many people who were not digital till then, conversational user interfaces are already doing the same so much faster.

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I can’t help but wonder: Could this be a way to decentralize and give digital power back to the people? Could small digital companies have a better shot at long-term survival in the new ecosystem that rises, or will power end up even more concentrated? Will this bring tighter software thanks to expert computer scientists empowered by AI, or will the digital space degrade due to a bunch of “spaghetti code” that is difficult to understand and maintain? Will no-code builders like Replit or Lovable bring people closer to understanding code, or will they have the opposite effect?

I have no answers, but let me just say that my curiosity brought me closer to the code than I had ever been in 25 years, and I’d encourage you to do the same: get just a bit closer from wherever your starting point may be. Just seek to understand, and remember we understand a lot by doing. The world is changing very quickly, and the new AI wave will most likely affect you whether you want it or not. You may as well understand what’s coming, and as we would say in Spain, take the bull by the horns.

Source: Noel-IA’s Substack

Image: Snapcat by Oleksandra Mukhachova & The Bigger Picture