Issue 33 · October 16, 2026

The Future is Build & Share

Written without AI. A stream-of-thought first pass; only obvious typos fixed.

This is a first pass “stream of thought” dump…a pre-first draft excavation of thoughts rattling around in my head due to time constraints this weekend.

7 months in to this “build with AI” experiment, and I don’t have much to show in terms of marketable products and services, but in a world where AI lowers and often eliminates the barrier to building, the future may be more about building stuff for yourself / asking AI to build whatever you want, and sharing anything interesting you/your AI has conjured up with others. Why just share? Why not market? Because why would anyone buy when their own AI can just duplicate whatever you’ve created?

Maybe this isn’t all bad if we no longer need an App Store or SAAS and can merely conjure or copy whatever we want out of thin air so to speak. The challenge I think is for people and businesses that earned a living monetizing software. What remains scarce and potentially income producing is anything that requires human contact (or where human contact remains highly desirable if not strictly required) and perhaps fields that are unverifiable, subjective, and culturally, politically, and context sensitive … like philosophy and ethics…where AI appears, so far, to have little if any advantage over humans.

All this is to say building with AI is immensely satisfying on a personal level even at the novice and “over the hill” level. My current projects include a personal Executive Function app that scans select emails (forwarded from select domains) and creates proposals for addition to my iCal and/or addition to my personal “talk list” ranked by high, medium, low importance and from which I can escalate items I am ready (or soon will be ready) to execute to a Spotlight level and then finally a recurring reminder loop when I am pulling the trigger on getting something accomplished on a given day. So it eliminates the drudgery of scanning and reading all of my emails to find the few items I need to pay attention to, and helps me perform a task over a select time period when I am ready (so it keeps reminding me every 30 minutes or hour, whatever I prefer) until the task is completed. This app is currently installed and running on my iPhone.

Another project is my bespoke “daily state of AI” micro podcast that Grok Bot orchestrates/runs for me every day and then uploads to Spotify for Creators so I can listen to my own preferred content (and continue to fine tune it over time) on Spotify every day on the way to work.

Also another Grok Bot helps me create X posts and while I wish this was (or could be) entirely autonomous, it still seems to work much better if I am involved in the X post creation process by stating my thoughts and then refining with Grok Bot or another AI before posting - as opposed to just completely handing it off to Grok Bot.

My personal assistant Grok Bot is tracking our plane ticket prices and making recommendations when the best time to buy is.

And I am participating in this competition:
https://www.zacharygoodsell.com/ai-philosophy-competition
just to learn more about my own thinking process and AI’s. Turns out it’s really hard. AI is great in constrained/validated fields, but when there are no objective constraints, AI appears less capable…although without objective ways to validate outputs, how can we (humans) credibly claim the capacity to judge AI philosophical artifacts?

My son - using Grok Bot to create and manage a bespoke college excellence app. Not even sure what to call this app because it does everything. Integrates with his personal and school email and class websites. Tracks all assignments, syllabus, quizzes, tests, and any other “outside school” activities he wants to add. assignment tracker, content creation, advisor. Turns all of this into a fully integrated custom website/calendar/custom board with integrated custom prep quizzes in the format(s) he requests, distills and reformats study content into formats he requests (adding subtitles to video lectures), creating complete study documents from recorded lecture, taking all of the study material for a test (lectures, syllabus, texts) and creating comprehensive quizlet style interactive preparatory content that tracks questions you miss and returns to them systematically at intervals designed to optimize memory/retention and is also multiplayer/gamified so classmate(s) can sign in to also study/play and see who gets the highest score. Etc, etc, etc,

So all this is to say, when AI eliminates the barrier to entry and (most of) the cost for digital products and services creation, increasingly, everyone will just create (ask for) their own bespoke products - which also means monetization of these products and services (apps, software) will become increasingly difficult if not impossible. Why, would anyone buy something that their AI can just instantly copy or conjure out of thin air? So the future here may be “build and share”, and less “build and monetize”. The most productive human employment in the emerging world of AI/SI, if any, may be fields with unverifiable values and where human contact is still desired.

This is the author's stream-of-thought first pass, written without AI. Only obvious typos were fixed. It was the source draft the author gave to the author-line editorial runs (Claude Opus 5.5, Muse, and ChatGPT). It was never shown to the model that wrote the machine essay, or to the Stage C critics.