Words I never thought I'd say: I built an app.

Seriously. I'm not a software developer.

But I had an idea I cared about. Life By Decade, a visual way for people to tell the stories of their lives.

And somehow, here in the AI Wild West, I went from "wouldn't it be cool if" to "wow, it works."

People are using it. They're excited about it.

Rand Fishkin takes this excitement to another level.

(Rand is the co-founder of SparkToro, an audience research company, and one of the more honest voices in marketing.)

He's not talking about speed. He's talking about room for work that's stranger and more particular than most of what gets made.

Making ideas happen is far more human than assembling a bunch of chatbot output as if it were a piece of IKEA furniture.

Suddenly, we can make anything we want.

Not just generate stuff.

AI gives us a new ability to take an idea we care about and make the damn thing.

Not very long ago, Life By Decade would have required a development team and a serious budget. This is the kind of thing that used to take weeks, if not months, and tens of thousands of dollars.

Now I change my mind and rebuild it the same afternoon.

Most people are still skimming the surface of what AI can do.

Having conversations with ChatGPT or Claude is useful. But what's available now goes a whole lot deeper.

AI can help us move from ideas to meaningful output like never before. Working applications, websites, videos, publishing systems. Things that used to require more people, more specialized skills, more money, or all three.

I've been spending a lot of time in this territory, and increasingly, I'm helping clients use those capabilities to make things that would have been harder, or simply too expensive, to make before.

Websites are where I'm seeing this most clearly.

For years, a distinctive, highly customized website meant custom development and a substantial budget. The affordable alternative was a template you customized.

That's not what I'm doing now. I'm moving easefully between ideas, words, design systems, and functional pages, which means I can explore more possibilities and build something more expressive without the cost of traditional custom development.

If you've got a website that needs some new life, ask me. I'm here to help.

The part that matters most.

AI gives us a ridiculous abundance of possibilities.

Great. Now we get to choose.

So these are the questions I ask every time, before I build:

• Is this useful?
• Is this meaningful or uniquely beautiful?
• Is this delightfully weird?
• Is this worth putting into the world?

Not one of these questions can be answered by an AI model.

The more possibilities AI gives us, the more human judgment matters.

AI isn't making me want to be more like a machine.

It's giving me new ways to be creative, to make ideas happen, to make things that matter.

How fun is that?

What's the thing you'd make if the budget and the development team weren't the obstacle anymore? I'd love to hear about it.

Any questions, I'm here.

Use AI Well. Stay Human. Build What Matters.

— Jon