The Connection Engine​
Use AI well. Stay human.
Build what matters.

If your last ten conversations with AI were questions, this one's for you.

Because the same thing that answers your questions will also build you a working software app. In about a day.

The fact that AI already has this kind of power hasn't landed for most people yet.

I'm not writing this because the tools changed.

They did, but that's not the story. My story this week is that I keep digging. Four decades in and I'm still a lifelong learner, and going deeper is more or less the only professional strategy I've ever had. 😄

On Monday I built an app.

It's called LifeLines. You lay out the events of your life by decade, and then you can see the shape of your whole personal narrative. This is actually a well-established personal development technique.

That's my own timeline up above.

With my new app, you can add photos, and you can share the whole thing with your family and the people closest to you.

I don't write code. The speed and power of this new kind of web app development has honestly blown my mind.

What I did has a name. It's called vibe-coding.

You describe what you want in plain English. The AI writes the actual code. You tell it what's wrong, and it fixes it. I used an AI platform called Lovable, and I never looked at the code once.

Almost nobody outside of tech has heard of vibe-coding yet. Which is more or less why I'm writing to you today.

I've been hearing about vibe-coding for months.

I never tried it, because I didn't have an itch of my own that I wanted to scratch.

Then the itch showed up. My sister passed away recently, and I wanted to see her life laid out in decades. And, I realized I wanted to see my own life that way too.

Once that was clear, I made astounding progress in a day.

This is the kind of thing that used to take weeks, if not months, and tens of thousands of dollars.

What the AI could not decide was what app to build.

It will build anything you describe, but it cannot want anything.

It also couldn't tell me what was missing. My first user did that. She'd text me "I think I'd like to have this," and I'd build it in ten minutes. We wondered...

Could events span multiple years?

How many pictures should you be able to upload per event?

Don't the pictures need a caption field?

Every one of those came from a person using the thing and wanting more from it. The AI produced all those feature upgrades fast and well, but it never would have raised any on its own.

That loop is the whole story. Somebody wants something, and the distance between wanting it and having it is now an afternoon.

The same thing is happening with my client work.

All the new marketing workflows I've been developing lately are making me better at what I already do for clients.

You don't learn any of this by reading about it.

I've never learned anything worth knowing by studying it first. I learn by wanting something badly enough to spend time playing with it, then staying curious about what's unfolding, no matter how messy.

The part people skip is the playfulness. You can't experiment while you're afraid of being wrong.

My clients don't hire me because I've read the documentation. They hire me because I stay out ahead of the curve, playing with this stuff, finding out what's possible before anybody needs it to be.

Which brings me to an invitation.

My LifeLines app is free for now. If you're so inclined, or if the idea of laying out your own personal history decade by decade appeals to you, I'd love for you to try it.

Add your photos. Share it with your family and the people who'd want to see it. All those photos aren't doing anybody any good locked away on your iPhone.

The app works well, and I'm planning to keep building it out based on what people tell me. So tell me how it feels to use. What you enjoy, what you'd want next.

Create your LifeLines account

And in the meantime, what's your itch? Not the thing you think you ought to learn. The thing you actually want that doesn't exist yet.

Go play with that one. I'd love to hear what you find.

Creatively yours,

— Jon Leland AI Creative Director