Anyone who has a small child will know that anytime a birthday rolls around, you’ll get an influx of cheap plastic toys.

The vast majority of these become trash soon after they are purchased.

In fact, it’s shocking how quickly heavily-packaged items go from “brand new” to trash in our society, particularly in the kids' space.

And yet, in my garage, there’s a rusty pencil sharpener that must have been installed in the 1950s. I dusted it off the other day, and I doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that it still works perfectly, nearly a century later.

What of the things we buy from [insert name of the online store everyone buys everything from].com will stand the test of time?

And what should we give our kids instead?

Experiences! Swimming classes, piano lessons, a crazy dance class they’d never have gone to, that robotics course that might spark something real.

I committed myself to learning AI and vibe coding over the summer, and I made more progress than I ever dreamed possible while returning to my programming roots.

I made more than 7 fully functioning web apps in next.js. No courses, just got my hands dirty and tried to build things I’d actually use.

1. An intuitive compound interest visualizer
2. A dynamic Instagram carousel post maker (and LinkedIn PDF maker) that turns my text posts automatically into gorgeous image sequences with custom, cryptographic Easter eggs that would never be possible with a human designer.
3. A dynamic custom podcast artwork generator with batch export that’s always procedurally generated, again with the same custom, humanly-impossible features.
4. A blog uploading app that takes Notion markdown, simultaneously reformats it for LinkedIn, HTML (Webflow), and my newsletter and puts it into Airtable after checking all my previous posts for redundancy. Then, a make.com automation that automatically posts to my blog, my newsletter, and LinkedIn daily from my database. (That’s how you’re reading this post.)
5. A truly flawless custom 5-star review carousel that randomly takes a selection of my best reviews from Udemy and puts them into a responsive slider for my personal website, better than any .js swiper library I’ve ever used.
6. A transcription app that has transcribed all of my past podcasts, chunked them for vector storage in Supabase, and a RAG agent that lets me query any of the hundreds of podcasts I’ve ever made.
7. And a living digital resume that lives on my site for speaking gig booking.

I feel like I know SO much more about the pros and cons of all of these platforms, how APIs all integrate with one another, and the fundamentals of the modern coding ecosystem.

In short, I’m blown away. This has by far been one of the most exciting times of personal knowledge I’ve ever had.

When you look at a jumbo jet high in the sky, you see a little toy, peacefully sliding through the air.

You don’t perceive the roaring engines, chugging jet fuel.

When the sun warms you on a late summer day, you don’t notice the immense fury of its surface, far greater than all of our nuclear weapons combined, continuously exploding on a scale we can’t imagine.

To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, “It doesn't take much to see that the problems of people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

No matter how insane it may seem here on the ground, from a short distance away our little blue sphere quietly floats on, as it has always done.

I love Jim Carrey’s “Yes Man.” It perfectly shows how different our lives can be when we open ourselves up to opportunity instead of shutting everything down.

When you say yes to something, it’s never that thing that’s the real benefit.

It’s the knock-on effect.

It’s what that thing might bring you 4-10 chess moves down the road.

Every time you say yes to something, you open a world of new possibilities that never would have opened if you stayed closed off.

We interact with hundreds of software platforms a day.

Some of them we enjoy using (Spotify), and some of them we hate (Microsoft Teams… Well, anything Microsoft makes, basically).

It’s not a question of money thrown at the problem, it’s a question of taste.

Some of these platforms we can’t escape, as they’re orders of magnitude more complex than the great pyramids of Egypt.

But others? We can completely replace with vibe coding and AI.

Are there sites you visit for one purpose only? Like a compound interest calculator, or CapitalizeMyTitle.com?

You can make your own version of many of these today, and start using tools that look, feel, and behave how you want them to.