We now live in a world where you can just build things! I once heard of software development described as “building castles in the clouds” because it is generally abstracted away from physical reality, and that has never been more true than now. Castles abound in my sky!
II.
Jevons Paradox states that “technological improvements which increase the efficiency of a resource often lead to an increase in its total consumption, rather than a decrease”. Because coding is so much cheaper now, the activation energy for whether I should build a tool to scratch a particular itch is so low that I will kick a project off on a lark. I don’t finish all of them (one of the reasons activation energy was previously higher), but I finish enough that I feel my agency is through the roof. Castles not only abound in various states, but the decision to embark on a new one is effortless. For me, the paradox holds - I spend more total hours coding now (or doing something akin to coding) than I did when each project cost more.
III.
I’ve long said that agentic coding is great for people who like to build things but bad for people who like to craft things. If you get enjoyment out of writing a function just so, or a frisson from a class that elegantly allows an extension you hadn’t even thought of, then agentic coding tools will leave you feeling empty. If, on the other hand, you just want something to exist, then this newfound ability is the ultimate freedom. I expect most people exist in a confusing jumble of multiple points on this spectrum. In some ways, I know that I like craft - woodworking, in another context, where a factory-built piece of furniture would have been cheaper and faster to an end result. That makes it a little mystifying why for now, with code, I’m still marvelling at how much I can build. Perhaps I’ll lose my delight in manifesting personal pieces of software, but for now - just build things!
Here is a curated list of cloud castles I’ve built over the last year:
- Rotary Voip - A Raspberry Pi powered rotary phone that allows calling via VOIP
- Blockbuster - A physical media library that plays digital media
- Inventory - A small app that logs where everything in the house is, with built-in NFC and QR code tracking
- Tempo MCP - An MCP for lightning-fast in-memory calendar reconciliation
- Cueso - Voice/text-controlled app for Roku
- Roku MCP - An MCP for controlling Roku
- RIP TUI - A simple TUI for ripping multiple Blu-Rays/DVDs to a media collection
- Life Maintenance - A small CLI and skill that tracks all of my house maintenance tasks
- TODO - A small CLI and skill on top of my daily todo system
- Treasure Chest - A treasure chest for my daughter’s birthday
- Agent Instructions - skills and code shared across all of my agents, for coding, writing, and manipulating many of the tools in this list
- lnk - An internal URL shortener that sends deep links via Telegram (for personal agent assistants using Slack/WhatsApp/Telegram)
- Adventure Ball - A roguelike/arcade game mashup where you rotate the world instead of your character
- Age Verification Widget - Ultra-simple age verification widget for my wife’s wine shop, so that she didn’t have to pay $30/month for a commercial widget
- Estate PDF Organizer - Tool for organizing batches of scanned documents for managing an estate
- stashlr - A tumblr clone for an internal tumblr experience for my family
- speclib - A project for formalizing spec library
- Mountain Bike Route Finder - A tool to create mountain bike routes with natural language and download to my Garmin