The Builder's High

There is a strange addiction emerging around building things.

Not to building products, exactly. To the feeling of building them.

I come up with an idea. I open Codex. A few hours later, there is a website where there wasn’t one before, a landing page, a logo, a domain, and a launch post (optional).

And then, I get bored and a new idea emerges.

The cycle repeats.

It always feels great. The feeling of doing something.

But there is something drug-like about it. Not because building a product is inherently bad, but because it provides an unusual amount of progress. You have an idea, you act on it, and reality changes almost immediately.

A few years ago, an idea came with friction. You had to know how to build it. You had to spend days or weeks implementing it.

That friction forced a question:

Is this worth building?

Now, that question is barely there. It has become obsolete.

What took months before can be done in hours. I can have an idea at midnight and have a functioning prototype before I go to sleep. The barrier between an idea and creation is gone.

And based on my experience for the last couple of months and based on what I’ve seen, I’m not sure if that is entirely good.

I feel like the easier building becomes, the easier it is to confuse building with progress. It’s like building houses half done not because you couldn’t finish it but because the idea of a new design excites you.

Over the past few months I’ve noticed myself redesign constantly, add features nobody asked for, launch products with no distribution, over and over again. That’s called iteration which is another term for procrastination.

And then there is the strangest part, we’ve started asking the machine to validate us.

“Is this a good idea?”

“Would people pay for this?”

“Who is my target market?”

“Is this differentiated?”

The LLM responds instantly, confidently, endlessly.

It gives us competitors, market sizes, positioning statements, names, pricing strategies. It can turn a simple idea into something that looks like a full blown unicorn.

And that is dangerous.

Because we can now manufacture something that feels like validation without ever asking another human being.

Reality is a terrible validator because reality can hurt you.

An LLM is much kinder.

And so we seek validation in the safest possible place while believing we’re doing market research.

The point is, the product has essentially become secondary. The feeling of building something new has become the goal.

The next idea is always more exciting than the current product.

The next landing page is more satisfying than figuring out why nobody converted.

The next launch gives you another opportunity to feel like you’re moving.

Artificial Intelligence was supposed to give us leverage.

Instead, it gave emotionally volatile beings the power to create anything instantly.

Learning when and what not to build has become increasingly important.

Sit with an idea long enough to find out whether anyone actually cares. Talk to people instead of asking a language model. Spend a month doing something boring. Finish the thing after the dopamine disappears.

Just don’t wake up years from now and realize you’ve spent your life moving, but never actually going anywhere. That genuinely scares me.