Fun little projects, and the shrinking gap between idea and execution

It so happened that I was both editor and scriptwriter for several projects about AI. When they were just starting to appear, we made two seasons of the podcast «И тебя заменят» (“It’ll Replace You Too”), where we explained how AI work with references to pop culture. Then there was a special season of «Хакни мозг» (“Brain Hack”) about how similarly (or differently) our brain and artificial intelligence work. And this summer I helped a little with the YouTube show «Репортаж на диване (“Couch Report”) — where, for script development, I ran vibe coding and agent setup experiments on myself.

So you could say I’ve been documenting and analyzing the development of AI for the last three or four years. And if you listen to the first episodes of «И тебя заменят» — we make predictions there that have already come true. That’s how fast this development is moving.

The main result of this development (for now) is not the tens of thousands of layoffs (although those too), but the shrinking gap between an idea and its execution.

Five years ago, to create, say, a Telegram bot, I needed to find a builder, learn a programming language, or pay someone to make it. Three years ago — I could do it by talking with ChatGPT, but it would have taken about a week and I still would have had to write the code myself. Today I can come up with a project in the morning and implement it by evening with the help of Claude Code.

For example, my friends and I watch English football and discuss it in a chat. Yesterday I thought, oh, it would be fun to run a tournament with match result predictions. A couple of hours — and I had a ready bot that records predictions, tallies scores, builds a standings table, knows the match schedule and can send deadline reminders. A fully fledged game just for the chat.

And these little fun projects are the perfect indicator of that shrinking gap. Spending resources on a game for 5 people used to simply not be worth it. But now anyone can create a personalized tool for friends, family, or themselves. One that entertains, makes life easier, or is just nice to have.

This gap has become so small (and will keep shrinking) that even the main question of digital entrepreneurship has changed. Before, that question was: how do you execute an idea. Whoever executed better, whoever had more resources, won.

Now the question is — what exactly is the idea? And how we will distribute it? Because now anyone can execute — but coming up with an idea that’s viral enough, that’s another story.