Like tiny little bank-account-draining demons, the dozens of software subscriptions we all have chip away at us over time.

But here’s a secret:

Try to cancel as many of them as you can name today, and many will say “WAIT DON’T GO! HOW ABOUT 80% OFF FOR THE NEXT 3 MONTHS INSTEAD?”

Set a calendar reminder, and take the discount, saving you a bunch for the next several months.

Not enough for you?

Cancel 5 of them right now.

You’ll feel better.

…it’s about a way of seeing the world.

It’s not about the programming language or the specific tools.

It’s about solving problems.

If you can solve a problem, it doesn’t matter how you do it.

…all the tiny thorns in your side.

The little mosquito bites, easy to ignore, chipping away at your productivity.

Do you keep track of all the things you do over and over again?

If something’s given you repetitive stress, it’s a candidate for automation.

Do you ever behave like a robot in some part of your work?

Do you ever do the same thing over and over again, even if it’s a couple of minutes a day?

These are the things you can probably automate right now with AI and claim some small part of your sanity back.

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.