There used to be a real gap between having an idea and actually building something. Not just in skill, but in setup time, in all the decisions you had to make before writing a single line, in the scaffolding you needed before anything interesting could even happen.

That gap is mostly gone now. And I have proof: this website.

I built it in about an hour. That number is being generous and includes the time I spent not actually working on it, the tab switching, the mild procrastination, and a coffee or two. Real decision-making time was probably closer to twenty minutes.

Here is the thing: before starting, I had no idea what Astro was. I’d never set up Vercel. I’d never configured a domain on Cloudflare. My only stated requirement was that I wanted pushes to GitHub to show up on my live website as quickly as possible. That was it. One sentence. Claude Code took it from there, figured out the stack, explained each decision along the way, walked me through buying the domain on Cloudflare, and did all the mechanical work. For all I know it would have suggested a completely different approach if I had asked differently. I just made decisions when prompted and got out of the way.

What you are reading right now is the result. It builds, deploys on every push, and looks like something a person made intentionally.

This isn’t a post about AI being magic. It’s about activation energy. Starting a project has always had a hidden cost that nobody talks about: the time and learning required before you can make any visible progress. That cost quietly killed a lot of good ideas. Nobody eagerly starts something they think will take forever just to get off the ground.

Now that cost is close to zero.

So here is my call to action: go build something. It doesn’t matter what it is or how small. A webpage, an app that does one thing and works for exactly one person, a game, a side project you’ve been quietly putting off for months. The size genuinely doesn’t matter. Each of us has more power to create things right now than any previous generation, and it would be a real shame to never use it.

Your first attempt won’t be perfect. That’s completely fine. Most first attempts at anything aren’t perfect. Practice makes perfect, and the only way to practice is to start.