Writing code is cheap now. For a while, code has been expensive, it took an engineer a day to grind out a few hundred lines of code. But now that code is cheap, what should we do? There are now so many parts of our lives that could be automated or made easier with a prompt and ten minutes. These are use cases that do NOT require good code, just good-enough code. Good code is on sale, but not cheap yet.
Debugging Tools
I hit an integration bug in an AWS Lambda pipeline at work recently. I was about to start manually tracing through the whole thing, but then I realized I could just let AI take the wheel and add the debugging statements, pull the results from S3, write a program to analyze them, and isolate the issue. Writing a one-off program just to analyze debug files was not worth until now. It ended up pinpointing the bug to a non-deterministic ML library causing inconsistencies in the output, something that would have taken me ages to verify otherwise.
Make Visualizations
Visualizing a concept helps make something concrete and digestible, especially when it’s abstract. Making these demos can take ten minutes of prompting to get something good enough to get teach something intuitively.
A great example is Veritasium’s explanation of power laws, which had a few vibe-coded interactive demos to visualize the concepts behind demagnetization, forest fires, earthquakes, and sand piles.
One-off Applications for Tedious Tasks
Write a script to edit your Kanban board with the 1000 different tags all in different drop down menus. Build an app to track your job applications instead of white-knuckling a spreadsheet. Make a tool to auto-configure a new Angular app repo.
Anything that is tedious and repetitive can probably be automated with a tool. This starts to creep into the world of OpenClaw, deterministic tools stomp AI in so many use-cases. If you don’t need AI to interpret or help with fuzzy boundaries code is better.
Prototyping
Instead static Figma drawings you can spin up clickable interactive prototypes of different UI/UX flows. One trick to brainstorm new ideas is to ask Claude to make 5 different versions of this UI. This generally yields way better results because there are more options and there is a variety between them that you don’t get rerolling Claude.
The New Skill
With this paradigm shift, you can make tools to eliminate bottlenecks and unlock abilities that weren’t worth the effort before. Coding quickly is nice, but the the real cash-money is building these one-off tools.