The Promise of AI (Part IV) - Borrow from giants and ask no one

If I have seen further it is by standing on [the] sho[u]lders of Giants.

— Isaac Newton

While you can now just build things, even with the advances in AI, there remains a gap between can and do. That gap used to be a lake and now it's a creek. You can now walk across that creek and build things, but only if you believe you can.

We're wired to look for someone to tell us it's ok to start. Learning to move beyond asking for permission is scary. To help think about this in the context of AI, we can return to Melanie Perkins from Part II of this series.

Getting the onboarding process right was vital for Canva because they found in early user testing that people sometimes gave up without doing much on the platform. A reason for this was that people didn't truly believe they were actually capable of designing things. Without doing something remarkable in onboarding, these users would be lost to Canva and put a ceiling on what the company could achieve. By getting new users to do a few gentle activities during onboarding, Canva helped build the self-belief in their users that they could design. Aspiring builders need to believe they can build and AI is the new onboarding for permission-less builders.

If you don't need to ask anyone to start, that also means more of the ideas need to come from you. The good news is that while originality is important, you can borrow from other things you like, synthesizing them into something new. AI coding tools can now interpret your instructions in English and use examples you share from elsewhere as inspiration to build your ideas. When building products for myself, I borrow the aesthetic ambition and functionality of others and apply it to what I'm working on, even when it's as simple as a timer. Some examples that have caught my eye and the eyes of people I follow on X include almost anything from Apple, those of leading VCs and incubators, consumer products I use like Whoop and Opal and those that elevate the mundane, such as Flighty.

For new builders worried that other people will think your ideas aren't good or won't work, keep going. Hardly anyone except the founders thought Canva would be successful and they pressed ahead anyway. The truth is almost nobody actually knows what will work.

Put your ideas out there and borrow from what you like, standing on the shoulders of the generation of founders who often knew even less than you did. Thanks to AI, you don't need permission to find out if it works (although do remember to ask Claude Code to make sure you haven't put your API keys on the front-end).

Nobody knows anything ... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one

— William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting