Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…So I do work with a few companies that does these things of they want employees to come up with ideas. So there's a big debate on what is a better way for AI strategy, should they be top out or bottom up, should executives come up with one or two killer use case and everyone allocate resource to that, should you give engineers and PMs and smart people come up with ideas. And I think it's a mixture of both. So some companies it was like, okay, we hire a bunch of smart people, let's see what they come up with and they organize more hackathons or internal challenge to get people to build product. And one thing that I noticed, a lot of people just don't know what you built. And it shocked me why I feel like we are in some kind of an idea crisis, right? Now, we have all this really cool tools to have. You do everything from scratch, can have you design, it can have you write code, it can build website. So in theory, we should see a lot more, but at the same time, people are somehow stuck. They don't know what to build. And I think it's like, maybe you see a lot of had to do with maybe society expectations because we have gone into this phase of specializations, people very highly specialized and people are supposed to focus on one thing really well instead of being a big picture. And we don't have a big picture view. It's hard to come up with ideas of what you build. So I know what, when I work with this company on this hackathon, we do work on come up with a guideline, how to come up with ideas. And usually what we think of is like, okay, one tip is go look from the last week. For a week, just pay attention to what you do and what frustrates you. And when something frustrates you, think about, is there anything we can do? Can it be done a different way? So it's not frustrating and you can talk, people can swap to accept [inaudible 01:10:27] or teams, and I even see they come on frustrations. Maybe there's something you can think about just to build something around that. So yeah, so I feel like just notice how we work, thinking of ways, constantly ask questions, how can this be better? And then I just build something to address the frustrations, I think it's a good way to learn and adopt AI. I think people have felt exactly what you're describing every time they open up one of these vibe coding tools where you could just describe anything you want. I'm like, "I don't know, what do I want?" And I love this very tactical piece of advice, just like what frustrates you, just pay attention to where you're frustrated. For example, I just built a very cool little vibe coded app. I was working on a newsletter post inside Google Docs and I pasted all these images into the Google Doc, from screenshots and stuff and then I forgot, oh yeah, you can't take images out of Google Docs. It's like this Hotel of California experience where you can paste stuff into it, very hard to get images back out. So I just went to all the vibe coded tools and just built an app that I can give you a Google Doc URL and it let me download all the images automatically. And it worked amazingly well and I made it really cute. And I'll link to it in the show notes. OH, I would love to see that. I'm very bullish on using AI, just create micro tools. It's just something just make your life a bit easier.…

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