There is just so much going on in AI these days, and it’s hard not to feel like you’re always falling behind, which is interesting and scary at the same time. I’ve spent the last few months trying to get on top of every new tool I hear about on podcasts or in Lenny’s Newsletter, hunting for use cases, and spending more time than I probably should on improving my context system at work, whether that’s finding more MCPs to connect or getting better analysis or writing out of it. AI prototyping has even turned back on the creative side of my brain, which I had long given up on after getting Cs in art at school despite my absolute best efforts.
But there’s still so much happening with vibe coding and agents way outside what I do in my role. Many product leaders I know are getting their hands dirty again instead of just running teams. The whole model is changing, from how teams are organised to how much more one high-agency person can do, and I’m a little overdue to dive deep too. As with all things, though, it’s hard when there’s always something more urgent that needs my attention. Now that I’m on holiday in Phuket and finally have some time to reset, I went hunting for a curiosity project, and found one!
So in the spirit of accountability, here goes: I’m committing to writing about what I build and learn along the way. Partly it’s to keep myself honest, because it’s easy to start a side project and let it drop when nobody is watching, and partly it’s because I’m taking in a huge amount of information and trying a lot of things, and I need somewhere to stop and think. Writing it down forces me to work out what I actually learned and to start forming my own opinions along the way, knowing I’ll probably change my mind a million times as I learn more and as the whole AI world keeps evolving. And hopefully it’s useful to anyone else on a similar journey.
My first project is GridCollector, an app for Formula 1 trading card collectors.
To almost everyone I know, this will seem wildly random. They would bet I have never watched a single Formula 1 race, and they would be right. But while I was searching for an interesting problem to solve, I happened to be chatting with an old friend who had just started trading Formula 1 cards, and it opened up an entirely new world to me: a really niche but hardcore community of people chasing cards.
As a problem, it hooked me straight away, mostly because everyone collects differently. One person will go to the ends of the earth for every Max Verstappen card in existence, another will only chase pink cards, and another just wants to see the full set from #1 to #200 laid out perfectly in order. Some only want cards graded PSA 10 and some couldn’t care less, and then at the very top end there are people who only chase 1/1 cards. With thousands of cards in existence, so many variants of each and endless reasons to want any one of them, it looked like a really fun problem to solve.
My friend is deep in the community, which means we already have a good start on distribution, and I get to bring my product hat, satisfy my curiosity and find out first-hand how much AI has changed what it takes to build something. It’s true that it’s getting easier for anyone to build, but that doesn’t mean what gets built is any good, so the real challenge will be building something useful and loved.
I don’t know where this will go, but I’m excited to find out.