Why play is producing better software than strategy right now + grab the 4 prompts I use before I build anything

Something clicked in the last six weeks, and the word I keep reaching for is playfulness. Which is probably not what you expect.

The AI discourse is loud right now, and most of it is ominous. Jobs disappearing. Deepfakes and misinformation. Existential risk. The think pieces are anxious; the comment sections are angry. I’m not here to dismiss any of that — the concerns are real and worth taking seriously.

But there’s a different story happening in parallel, quieter and stranger, and I want to talk about that instead.

By early 2025, “vibe coding” — Karpathy’s term for building software by prompting — started spreading fast. But for most of the year, it was still work. You had to fight the tools. Babysit the AI through its confusion. Debug weird failures that made no sense. The friction was high enough that you had to be serious about what you were building. You wouldn’t waste that effort on something frivolous.

What shifted isn’t just that the tools got better — though they did. The models hold context longer. The agentic patterns matured. The builder platforms got more reliable. But the real change is downstream of all that: the friction dropped enough that building software stopped feeling like work and started feeling like play.

And play produces different things than strategy.

Last week, a service called Fable started making the rounds. You upload a photo of your pet, and it generates a Renaissance portrait — your dog as a Baroque duke, your cat as a Flemish noblewoman — then ships you a physical print. It’s ridiculous. It’s delightful. Depending on which viral screenshots you believe, it’s doing six figures a month.

That’s not an “identify a market need and execute” story. That’s a “wouldn’t it be funny if…” story. Someone was playing. They built the joke. The internet turned out to have demand for it.

The internet has always been an infinite pool of demand. What’s new is that the cost of probing that demand just collapsed. You can try things now. Build the dumb idea. See what happens. If nobody cares, you lost a weekend. If they do, you’ve got something.

Here’s what’s inside:

• The hobby nobody expected. Why software creation is going through its “smartphone camera” moment — and what that means for people who’ve never written a line of code.

• Software vision. The real skill that separates people who thrive with these tools from people who bounce off them — and it isn’t coding.

• The honest limitations. A few failure modes that kill projects, and how to avoid them without slowing down.

• The tool decision. Builder platforms vs. CLI tools — which path fits your situation, and what you’re trading either way.

• The skill that actually matters. Why experienced developers extract more value from AI coding tools than beginners — and what that tells you about what to practice.

Let me show you what the weekend window actually looks like — and how to tell if you’re the kind of person who should climb through it.