Most people teach you how to build something big. But I think we should learn how to build something small.
Here are a few small things I've built. All of these were built as side projects. I built them purely out of passion, not for monetary gains:
Frontend Slides (16k stars on GitHub): a skill that lets you create beautiful HTML slides with coding agents
Follow Builders (3.6k stars on GitHub): a skill that gives you a daily newsletter consisting of tweets and podcasts from a strictly curated list of AI builders
Tab Out (1.1k stars on GitHub): a Chrome extension that turns your New Tab page into a Mission Control where you can clearly see your open tabs and easily close them
Why build something small?
1. Every big thing starts as a small thing
Positioning is everything. Most products fail not because they were too narrow, but because they targeted too wide.
If you're everything to everybody, you end up being nothing to nobody. You become a generic, bland thing that will be eaten by Claude.
2. Build for fun, build to learn
Don't take software too seriously.
Building software used to be a serious, utilitarian pursuit. People mostly did it to make money. This made sense when software was scarce and expensive.
But now that software is cheap and abundant, you can actually do it for fun. Vibe coding is basically my weekend hobby now, and some of my little skills feel more like art projects. We need to overcome the scarcity mindset for software. You're totally allowed to build something useless.
Building something is also the best way to learn. In the traditional education system, you learned to build. In the AI era, this is now reversed: you build to learn.
3. Build an opinionated product
Software is a form of self-expression and a medium for storytelling. When you build a piece of software, you're embedding a little piece of yourself in it: your unique way of thinking and doing something.
Now that AI can build anything really quickly, what makes people want to use your software, not somebody else's?