Create Every Day

It’s a wild world we live in. Anything’s possible. And what do you build when you can build anything?

On one hand, engineers are doing random things like building switchboards for their AI agents. On the other hand, someone’s building a billion dollar company with this. Everyone’s getting out of AI what they want.

What do you build when you can build…anything? Let me give an example. I’ve always loved blogging. Even in college I thought, “how do I get my thoughts out there?” When I was in high school, I used to write long monologues to whomever was listening, to just get some ideas out there into the world. I became fascinated with blogging when I heard of a family member doing it. I eventually made my own blog.

I then dove into Jekyll in 2016 when I first launchd bryanwhiting.com. I’ve done many blogs since then, and each one has been on a different platform. I’ve gone heavy on it, then faded from it (due to complexity). What’s held me back? Usually some program somewhere gets out of sync and I can’t blog from my phone.

For a while, I had a slick automation going on my phone where I had an Obsidian vault syncing to Working copy through file sync, then that would push to Git, where my Quarto-based blog would be published. To add images, I’d create the image in ChatGPT and then save it through an iOS shortcut automation that would dump it in the relevant directory in my Files app. If I was lucky, my Obsidian app would be able to locate it and I’d easily pull it in (I had another automation for this, too).

What resulted in all of this? I cranked out like 200 blog posts in 3 months. Eventually, one day, my Working Copy disconnected, and then I didn’t blog for 2 years.

Honestly, nobody noticed.

But I lost the connection I had with that part of myself. Nobody notices if I journal, either. People noticing my blog is not the point. The point is, Good writers write every day (Seth Godin does it every day. He dumps his thoughts on https://seths.blog/.

What do you write about when you can write anything?

This is the question that breeds creativity. Who else does things every day? Dan Reynolds, lead of Imagine Dragons, writes a song every day. Out of 200 songs he writes, one makes it to an album. Going further, James Clear (author of Atomic Habits), talks about how Jerry Seinfeld writes a joke every day. I quote James directly here to illustrate: James has habits, and he talks about Jerry’s habits.

Success comes from practice and pattern recognition. After starting this blog again for the 5th time since 2016, I decided I just need it. It fills a gap in me.

I learn something from writing every day. From thinking every day. From publicly sharing every day.

Create every day

So if you can create anything anytime, what do you create? Today I created an app on Replit. I saw they launched on React Native.

Last weekend, I created my own deep researcher. I can scan the internet, find interesting ideas, and catalog them (I’ve tried Obsidian ReadItLater, Obsidian WebClipper, and Hypothesis web note taker). I stopped using those because of friction. I built my own because I wanted to “bookmark” the world, take notes, and learn something from the things I didn’t understand about what I was seeing. So that’s the bryanwhiting.com/ai area - the deep research that takes tweets and generates notes for me. I learn one thing by reading, another by diving in.

But I still need to follow the “learn one, see one, do one, teach one, integrate one” approach - most just stop at “learn”, “see”. I like that it’s easy for us all to now “do” with AI. “Teaching” is a fun one because I can now use this blog to teach what I’m learning. Not for you (again, nobody’s noticing Dan Reynold’s 200 songs). I teach because I practice teaching.

The “integrate” part is where you take an idea and you actually have to integrate it. So many people scroll twitter without doing anything about the ideas they encounter. You can’t build a business unless you have lead flow. You can’t grow a following without a way to share your ideas.

With Dan, he integrates his lessons learned into albums. Jerry integrates his jokes into his “production” flow.

I’m a digital creator. An ML creator. An app creator. An experience creator. An automation creator. I’m probably too many creators to be good at any of them, but this blog is how I integrate.

To integrate my own, human thoughts into the world, I built a new blogging tool with React Native. It syncs to my GitHub, it pulls down this blog, it has a template I can copy and edit, and I can get my real, human thoughts into the world.

This blog is my digital brain. Today I went from just AI and bookmarking to integrating my own human thoughts in a seamless way. I created something.

What did I build today, being able to build anything?

I built an automation to save me time. It cost me $20 in AI credits to make. Maybe it’s part of a vicious cycle of tools, and I’ll re-create my flow anew in 2028. But today, I created.

And I also gained an answer to the question I’ve had all week: what does my software job look like when I can create anything? When anyone can create anything? When the best programmers in the world are recognizing that picture-perfect, 300M-line software will be built with just a prompt (and built in Rust). What do you build when you can build anything?

You build something.