The One-Click Era and the People Who Carve

The time I spend thinking and deliberating has shrunk. It's because I can now make things far too quickly — fast enough that the deliberation itself starts to feel wasteful.

Making used to be the domain of the craftsman. And the value of the craft often outweighed the idea itself.

Two Kinds of Makers

Having an idea but being unable to execute it was common. So what mattered was either having the ability to execute yourself, or finding a craftsman who would. People with that kind of drive gathered others, formed teams, built startups. A way of stamping out results at speed.

Many of the founders I've watched turned ideas into reality this way. A good background, a way with words, a passion that moves people, a gift for speech — each mobilizing whatever weapons they had.

There's another kind: people who quietly try to build something as a side project. They have the will to make something because they need it, but often lack the nerve to grow it into a business. I belong to this group too. I've lost count of how many times I've happily thrown myself into a side project, only to let it fizzle out.

In the 2020s, the scope of side projects widened. Beyond doing what you love, more people started attempting them as a second job, as a revenue pipeline. It's probably the same current that, after the startup boom faded and the investment market froze, swelled the ranks of one-person companies built to minimize risk.

The One-Click Era, and the People Who Carve

Execution used to be scarce. That's why the people who could execute — the craftsmen — were rare. But AI has driven the price of execution down close to zero. In a world where everyone is a craftsman, only one scarcity remains: a problem you've actually lived. The moment you can build anything, what to build becomes the only question.

Lately these people have grown wings. AI has built a world where a single click — from planning to production — spits out a result. The problem is that results handed off entirely tend to be mediocre. Apps and projects with a decent shell but a useless core are pouring out.

AI answers "how to build it" perfectly, but it cannot answer "why it should be built." Because it has never been inconvenienced by anything. So the one-click output looks plausible, yet rarely scratches anyone's actual itch. Polish and usefulness sit on different axes.

This is exactly where the side-projecters matter — the ones who build because they love it, because they need it, carving and fitting it to themselves one piece at a time.

Their weapon isn't grand. It's that they are their own first user. In corporate development, a need wears down a little as it passes from planner to designer to developer. One-click building removed the cost of development, but it just as easily erases the person who actually felt the need. For the side-projecter, the one who felt it is the one who builds it — no loss in between.

Their hearts may be light, but they don't take planning and need lightly. They may not reach the obsessive customer focus that forges the very best product, but in the one-click era, the role of making something with meaning may well fall to them.

Things That Start From a Need Will Explode

Of course, most side projects still fizzle out. I'm exhibit A. But when the cost of trying drops close to zero, the sheer number of the few that survive explodes. And what separates the survivors from the discarded isn't technical skill. It's whether there was a real need at the starting point.

If the true frontier pioneers AI itself, these people will be the ones who, amid countless clicks, pick out the things worth making and spread them. That's why I believe the genuinely fun and fresh things will explode not inside corporations, but in the domains where development starts from a need.

Scarcity keeps moving. Once it was execution; now it's a real need. Next, it will probably be being found. When everyone can build, building is no longer the bottleneck. Among the flood of results, who you reach and who finds you becomes the next form of value.

That's why I'm drawn to the idea of weaving these people together. If the old developer community was a place to share information through technology, what's needed now is a venue where different personalities from different fields make and ship projects outside their day jobs — and recognize and spread one another's work. A place where the people who make and the people who can spot it gather together.

The easier the click gets, the sharper the place becomes for the person who knows what to carve — and the person who knows how to spot it.