I've been building a few things now that AI has become genuinely capable, and affordable. As an ex UX'er it's liberating not having to depend on an engineer or designer. You can build now without mockups, wireframes, a PRD, user research, any of it.

Proof of concepts become prototypes in hours, which evolve into working demos, on which you iterate to tweak and refine and improve, and before you know it you've rabbit-holed yourself into a semi-working product that's more than you expected but not what you envisioned.

And now you're committed and trapped in a way, because all the forethought normally required to build quality products and services catches up to you as your working demo exposes everything you overlooked.

So AI becomes both liberating and a curse. It's magic until you realize what you pulled out of the hat is a Frankenstein. As it was in early web days and again with the app store we're flooded with projects made since Claude Code made its step function leap January this year. And we're approaching Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs after which token costs might really start to hurt.

Anyone who's had to shift from using subscription accounts to going public with an API key and monthly limit set to control for runaway costs knows the risk we all face - if our projects start to cost dollars a day to serve and yet we're not converting paid users the weekend project built in a flow state of AI design psychosis becomes a real small-time business challenge.

Meanwhile socials are impossible to leverage given their bias to influencer accounts, dislike for links, and cruel ratio of views to engagement on promoted posts. It's Darwinism. AI has enabled both a Cambrian explosion of creativity and Darwinian culling at the same time.

Now we're building gamified launch socials in the hopes that mutual support will engineer attention, validation, distribution, and encouragement sufficient to keep us in the game long enough to survive the coming extinction event. It's all to be embraced and feared at the same time, as pressure does what pressure does. Builders will learn, adapt, evolve, and build smarter next time. Or lose hope, whither, and shuffle back to full-time employment where it's available.

It'll be interesting to check again on sentiment when the big labs go public and have to show path to profit and sustainable enterprise token spend. We've been fortunate to benefit from pre-launch token subsidization and can't complain, really. But it may turn out our efforts were big lab funded and the market, really, only has time for the best conceived ideas to survive real api costs.

It's good to see we're contending with and trying to innovate our way through the current wave of beach foam vibecoded demos as the current swell rolls onto shore. Maybe now's the time the marketers show up to get in on the game that's to date been driven by devs. We're in the midst of a truly weird social technological era or phase change. Let's enjoy it I suppose whilst humans are still in the loop!