What to build with AI, and what deserves your attention

I remember being a kid when social media took up less space in my life.

Now, everywhere I go, I notice people looking down at their phones. Scrolling, checking something, half somewhere else. The sight is so familiar that it almost disappears. It takes a moment of paying attention to notice how much attention is elsewhere.

I don’t have a clear date for when that changed. There was no cultural moment when everyone agreed that empty moments should become moments on a screen. A behavior can become ordinary without much conversation about whether we want it to.

I’ve been feeling something similar while working with AI, though the feeling there is mostly excitement.

I started coding at 16. By 20, I was getting real experience as a developer through internships at Fortune 100 companies. Technology has always shaped how I learn, how I work, and how I imagine what I might do next.

Agentic coding has changed what that imagination feels like. By agentic coding, I mean working with AI systems that can take steps in a development task on their own: changing code, running a check, testing the result, and deciding what to try next. There’s still real work in explaining what I want, understanding what comes back, and deciding whether it’s any good.

What excites me is the range of things I can try now. Ideas that sounded like dreams are starting to feel a little closer to something I could actually make.

But being able to attempt more things leaves me with more decisions. Which problem is worth a week? Whose problem is it? Would the person I’m building for actually want the result? If I can make another app, what would make it worth someone else’s attention?

AI helps with doing the work. We still have to decide what good work looks like.

A practical place to start is your own problems. The annoying, tedious things you do every day, or only now and then but still resent, are good candidates for automation. It feels less like giving instructions and more like dancing with the tools until you find the outcome you’re looking for.

There’s no single right way to work with them. You find your own rhythm, the one that suits how you like to work, and you keep testing and learning.

Living through the same change differently

I feel this moment strongly. More strongly, sometimes, than the people close to me seem to.

I spend a lot of time with tools that have changed what I think is possible. I’ve also become aware of a growing gap between people who use them every day and people who barely touch them. We’re living through the same period with very different pictures of what’s actually happening.

Social media widens that gap. Combine one world-altering technology with another and the effects land differently for everyone. Each of us carries a different picture of the world, which is part of why no two For You pages look alike.

Nobody can predict how AI will affect society in the long run. What we can do is stop and think carefully about what’s happening while it’s happening, and I’d rather we do that together than alone.

The part that becomes background

I’m holding two feelings at once: unease about how much of life now happens through a feed, and excitement about what software is letting people make.

I don’t want to resolve that by pretending technology has a single effect. A phone can keep someone close to a person who’s far away, and it can fill the space between two people sitting next to each other. The same device matters in both ways.

AI raises its own questions. I’m interested in what happens after a new capability stops feeling new. What do we begin expecting from ourselves? From other people? When a tool saves us time on one part of the work, what do we do with that time?

I can’t answer those questions by looking only at what a system can produce. I have to look at the circumstances people use it in, and at what happens around the output.

That means following a little further than the impressive demo. It means asking what someone needed to know to get that result, what they checked, what failed, and whether the result was still useful after the excitement wore off. It also means leaving room to enjoy a good invention without requiring it to solve everything.

A place to keep looking

Newly Ordinary explores how AI, software, and digital culture affect everyday life. Technology is the medium we all live in now, and I want to understand what it’s doing to the life taking shape around it.

Curiosity is a good place to start.

So here’s one thing to think about this week: what’s one tedious task in your life you’d hand to a tool, if you trusted it to get it right?

Reply and tell me what you have in mind.

I appreciate you,

AP