Stop Begging Billionaires To Fix Software — Build Your Own

Culture

from the take-control-for-yourself dept

This is part one of a two-part series on using AI tools as one piece to fight back against tech company control of our lives. Part two shares the details of how I built my own task management tool in a few days for next to no money and without any coding skills. But first, we need to talk about why this matters.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how people need to take back some control and agency over the tools they use online. As I wrote at the time:

The internet was supposed to liberate us. Instead, it’s left us feeling helpless, waiting for billionaires, governments, and tech giants to save us.

The most insidious thing about Big Tech’s takeover of the internet isn’t the concentration of power — it’s how it’s trained us to beg for scraps from our digital overlords.

So I decided to practice what I preach: I built myself a sophisticated personal task management tool using only AI — no coding knowledge required. Within three days, I was using it to manage my workday — and I keep making it better.

Here’s the thing: I know many of you think AI is overhyped bullshit. That it’s just another way for tech companies to extract value while delivering nothing useful. And you’re not entirely wrong about some of the hype. But, at times, those same AI tools can actually help you escape the very companies peddling them.

You can actually use those big tech company AI tools to escape some of “Big Tech’s” hold on your digital lives.

I now have a tool that works exactly to my specifications. I control the code, the hosting, the data. No company can enshittify it. No growth hacker can “optimize” it to extract more engagement. No billionaire can wake up one day and decide to charge for verification badges, import Nazis, or kill third-party apps.

It’s personal. It’s intentional — in that it’s based on my own intentions directly, rather than forcing me to fight a service provider’s best interests when they conflict with my own.

This is what “vibe coding” offers: the ability to build personal tools without knowing how to code, using natural language to create exactly what you need.

It’s not software from some big company trying to upsell me, grab my data, or control me.

In my original post earlier this year, I pointed out that we now have a generation of internet users who grew up entirely on giant platforms controlled by billionaires who believe their only recourse for anything is begging those same billionaires — or the government — to fix things.

But the nature of an open internet is that you have agency and you can make some choices yourself, taking back the power for yourself, rather than demanding that others make them for you.

The early internet was about many people building things themselves, often for themselves. The rise of giant platforms trained us to accept their constraints as immutable facts of digital life. But they’re not.

Yes, there are legitimate concerns about AI, including about the companies that provide it and how they operate. But dismissing the technology entirely means missing how it can be weaponized against the very systems of control we’re trying to escape.

Let me be clear about what this is and isn’t good for:

• Do use it for personal productivity tools, workflow automation, and small community projects
• Do think of it as digital DIY — sometimes you need a professional, sometimes you can handle it yourself
• Don’t use pure vibe coding for anything involving serious security, payments, or legal liability
• Don’t build public-facing apps expecting millions of users — at least not unless you’re okay dealing with major problems down the road

For social platforms, protocols like Bluesky’s AT Protocol are key (disclosure: I’m on the board). But for personal tools that don’t need social? Vibe coding changes the game entirely.

It was only in early February of this year that Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” to describe using AI tools to code things for you without needing to worry about all the details. You literally just chat with an AI until you get working software.

The concept exploded. By now, just four months later, there are already at least 15 books on Amazon about it (though the only serious ones — by Steve Yegge/Gene Kim and Addy Osmani — aren’t out until Fall, and I assume many of the others are AI generated slop).

This isn’t just “AI-assisted coding” where you still need to understand programming. This is describing what you want in plain English and iterating until it works. No coding knowledge required — my own coding skills are basically non-existent as the last time I really did anything directly with code was in the 1990s.

It turns out to be quite powerful. And liberating.

Ernie Smith used vibe coding to improve his own workflow, building a tool to use Obisidian (the popular note taking app) to post directly to his blog, which is built on Craft CMS. Smith, who is not prone to hyping AI tools notes how this seems like the proper use of the tool:

This is a situation where LLMs helped me solve a “me” problem without getting in the way of anyone else. I’m not going to be using LLM-created copy or images. But I did just figure out a way to save myself a ton of time when uploading a post, which I hope will make it easier to do so over time.

That’s exactly it. This isn’t about creating the next unicorn startup or replacing human creativity. It’s about solving personal friction points without waiting for some company to maybe add the feature you need (right before they pivot to crypto or whatever).

My task management system cost almost nothing to build and runs exactly how I want it to. No subscription fees, no feature creep (unless I decide to add those features), no suddenly discovering that my workflow has been “optimized” for someone else’s engagement metrics. No chance of waking up and finding out that my tool is owned by a fascist.

This is what taking back control actually looks like. Not begging Zuckerberg to “do better.” Not yelling at people on social media. Not hoping the government will save us. Just building what we need, for ourselves, on our own terms.

The companion piece shows you exactly how I did it for myself. But the why should already be clear: because what good is the open internet if we’re not using it for our own purposes.

Filed Under: agency, big tech, control, decentralization, enshittification, vibe coding