Building Is Now Faster Than Searching

We’ve reached a point where building your own app for a specific task is way faster than finding such an app or service on the internet.

I’ve been through this myself several times already, and again I was trying to figure out how to use the new video generation model from XAI. And everything they have ready-made is super limited and janky, and doesn’t solve the task I actually need.

In the end I wrote a React app in half an hour, hooked up an X.ai key there, and did everything I needed (the model turned out to be meh).

And besides finding something, you still need to choose from thousands of similar apps, figure out if they have the features you need, go through onboarding, pay for a subscription.

Plus somehow you need to transfer context. That is, what I want to do and what data or constraints or requirements I have, trying to fit them into the framework of a ready-made solution.

So if you can formulate a task in a few voice messages, and this task repeats more than once, it’s now much easier and more profitable to build your own than to search.

Code is super cheap now, but attention keeps getting more and more expensive.