The Promise of AI (Part III) - Defanging friction and just doing things

Friction shapes the world a lot more than policy

— Tobi Lutke (This Week in Startups podcast March 2021)

Friction is that invisible force you can't see and yet feel its presence everywhere. It's a big reason why objects eventually stop rolling. Just as friction slows a rolling object, it stops things from happening. Many of those interesting ideas that never got built, were stopped by friction. When people look at something that got built and say "that could have been me", at least partly they are acknowledging that there was some friction that stopped them.

AI takes a lot of the friction out of building things and that means many people will build things that would otherwise never have been built. Many of these things won't be very valuable but some will be. Even products that don't spread beyond the initial builder may help solve a particular problem that the builder had and which makes their life better. The existence of this website is testament to how AI taking out some friction turns nothing into something.

I bought the domain jeremycowcher.com five years ago and had done nothing with it until a few weeks ago. I suspect that I never did anything because I couldn't code and hadn't found the template website solutions (Squarespace, WordPress and the like) compelling enough to commit to. I put it in the "too hard" basket. It was too hard because I wasn't willing to try and overcome the friction involved with actually doing something. This five years of inaction was remedied by AI because I now write these posts in a TextEdit file on my Mac, and Claude Code does the rest.

Doing things is infectious. I got my start building things with AI after succumbing to the rave reviews on X for Claude Code and listening to Chris Hutchins on the "All the Hacks" podcast talk about using Claude to build different projects for him. Having done some Python courses, I felt comfortable enough in VS Code to get started with Claude Code. The truth is that the courses weren't necessary; anyone can get started with Claude Code. In fact, Claude Code has gotten me started on two other projects (Elementary Timer and IdeaKache), which I'll cover in Part V.

As one small example of how AI will reduce the friction of getting started, take the beginning of DoorDash. DoorDash has been in the news because of viral AI prediction articles, but it started with a simple landing page and personal phone number for restaurant delivery. While the DoorDash founding team had incredible technical talent, the landing page was simple. Before AI, if you didn't have any technical talent, the friction of building a simple landing page would stop many people. Thanks to AI, everyone can now build a simple landing page. As Ben Thompson noted, the hard part of building the three-sided market for DoorDash would remain. That first step, however, is available to everyone now. I'm comfortable predicting that we aren't going to get a bunch of new DoorDashs or Shopifys because anyone can build a landing page. I am sure we will get things that are wonderful.

And all the really successful people I know have a very strong action bias. They just do things. The easiest way to figure out if something is viable or not is by doing it. At least do the first step, and the second step, and the third, and then decide

— Naval Ravikant (source)

This post is provided for general information, commentary and discussion purposes only. It is not legal, investing or other professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any errors or omissions are unintentional. The views expressed are those of the author in a personal capacity and do not represent the views of any employer, client, partner or affiliated organization. Generative AI tools were used to assist with research and editing.