The Software Night Market

I started my career selling pulled pork sandwiches from a red wheely cooler in Dolores Park, San Francisco.

I started my career selling pulled pork sandwiches from a red wheely cooler in Dolores Park, San Francisco. From there it grew - setting up tables on sidewalks selling street-food, organizing hundreds of other aspiring vendors in grey-area legal spaces feeding thousands, running an underground supper club focused on wild foraged foods in warehouses and on houseboats. My career has been made in the cracks. That's where I've seen the real creativity happen in food. It's why chefs travel half way around the world to try street food at Night Markets. It's these kinds of places that are able to take real chances, to really innovate, in a way that someone with millions of dollars of investor money on the line never could.

With AI, I think software is about to have its popup moment.

Software development has always been an expensive endeavor, either in time or dollars. You either had to spend most of your life learning code to be able to create the skeleton of a product yourself, or have a lot of cash. This kept a lot of people out. With AI, all that's changed. Using these tools, I've built out my own software platform. Something that just a few years ago would have seemed completely impossible to do alone. What's surprising is that using AI to build software actually made my project more personal, not less. When you hire developers, you have to translate your vision through other people's understanding and technical constraints. But learning with AI, I could iterate and experiment directly, shaping every detail until it matched what I imagined. The product became more authentically mine than it would have been if I'd had a team build it for me.

I've worked for 20 years creating things in the cracks. Having strange, kind of out there ideas, and figuring out ways to make them happen, and to get people excited about them. I've never had much interest in 4 star restaurants or really in "business" in general. I see business as the vehicle that helps me keep creating, and I have never in my life seen a tool that helps people create like this one. AI is not going to take your creativity away any more than another person can. There is no such thing as being the "best" at creating. I can almost guarantee that at this moment there is someone in the world that is technically better than you at anything you'd want to try. Does that stop you from trying? No, because you know that the way you do it, although perhaps not the "best", is your way, and that "best" is always subjective.

I have personally, in the last 6 months, taught myself to code, and build out a production ready app. I'd say I'm on par with a midlevel full stack engineer in my ability. What would have taken years of education or tens of thousands of dollars to achieve five years ago, I did with a $20 AI subscription in 6 months. There is a ton I don't know, but I know how to find the answers, and I understand how everything fits together, and that's the key. I think that's the real power of this technology, it's opening the black box of developer's secrets that's kept so many creative people out.

Anyone with focus and a good idea can now make a software product. The keys are no longer in the hands of investors and engineers, but really all of us. What this means is, like popups, software can get creative. There has obviously been a lot of innovation in tech, but just look at the products we use. Most are built to maximize profit and scale - kind of like those million-dollar restaurants where everything needs to be very safe and very predictable. What if software could be more personal, more like those street food stalls where the cook knows exactly who they're feeding? Instead of massive platforms trying to be everything to everyone, we could have software built by people who deeply understand their community's needs.

I see a future where, like popup restaurants, software becomes a canvas for creative explosion. People creating apps that are laser focused on serving their specific community, and through that, really innovative expansive ideas that will serve us all. What if anyone could create an app, just with some focus and motivation? A few nights and weekends, and they have the skeleton of something unique and useful, created by them for their community. Instead of a few huge ideas, VC funded and served to us as the only option, what if we had hundreds of options, we could try and pick and choose, like a night market for software? A lot would be not great, like a lot of popups are not to the standard of a Michelin star restaurant, but they would be packed with honesty and creativity that's hard to come by when you answer to investors. The ideas they spawn, the ways of interacting with technology that never occur to someone trying to make a business case, would be things we can't imagine. New ways of putting together the same ingredients, but in totally new ways.

I believe right now is the best time in human history to create something and get it to the world. Just like those street food vendors who don't need a restaurant to make amazing food, we don't need massive resources to build meaningful software. We each have our own unique vision, our own way of combining ingredients that no one else would think of. And now we have this incredible tool that brings those visions to life. AI is a developer available 24/7, with infinite patience, ready to help bring your ideas to life, for $20/month. The future isn't about a few massive platforms dictating how we use technology - it's about thousands of creative people building exactly what they imagine, their way. That's the kind of future I see, and the one I want to help create.

-Iso