Absolutely great point about what lowering the floor of automation really unlocks in the world. I have a friend who used to look up some Major League Baseball stat every morning on ESPN.com. He recently vibe-coded himself an automation that would pull the specific stat he looked for every day, and it took him less than 20 minutes to get it working.
He's a developer with over 20 years of experience, so he could have whacked this out at some level. But who wants to actually look up specifically how to use a DOM for a particular purpose, or figure out how to reliably pull a specific element off of ESPN.com?
The floor had been lowered so much that, for him, crossing the threshold into custom software was very easy. I wonder whether we'll soon each take around a toolkit of a few software tools particular to ourselves simply because they are so easy to build.
> I wonder whether we'll soon each take around a toolkit of a few software tools particular to ourselves simply because they are so easy to build.
Yep definitely! Already seeing a lot of cases where I'm prefering to build custom software rather than try to reuse what already exists because it is so easy
> Code generation models and agentic tooling (like Codex or Claude Code - not an ad) have completely changed this for me this year. Now, automating work is almost free
thats a good way to think about automation.
I stopped reading after that line and automated the opening of common work applications in specific workspaces 😆
Oh I started to use obsidian today! Alright, that's my homework for the weekend 😅. Thanks for the example!!
Love this!
Absolutely great point about what lowering the floor of automation really unlocks in the world. I have a friend who used to look up some Major League Baseball stat every morning on ESPN.com. He recently vibe-coded himself an automation that would pull the specific stat he looked for every day, and it took him less than 20 minutes to get it working.
He's a developer with over 20 years of experience, so he could have whacked this out at some level. But who wants to actually look up specifically how to use a DOM for a particular purpose, or figure out how to reliably pull a specific element off of ESPN.com?
The floor had been lowered so much that, for him, crossing the threshold into custom software was very easy. I wonder whether we'll soon each take around a toolkit of a few software tools particular to ourselves simply because they are so easy to build.
> I wonder whether we'll soon each take around a toolkit of a few software tools particular to ourselves simply because they are so easy to build.
Yep definitely! Already seeing a lot of cases where I'm prefering to build custom software rather than try to reuse what already exists because it is so easy
> Code generation models and agentic tooling (like Codex or Claude Code - not an ad) have completely changed this for me this year. Now, automating work is almost free
thats a good way to think about automation.
I stopped reading after that line and automated the opening of common work applications in specific workspaces 😆
thanks for this article