home

In “Does smitten kitchen have a chocolate zucchini bread recipe?”, I wrote about creativity-on-rails: creating something because AI implies that you should have made it already.

My take was bleak and I realise now I automatically used another contentious use of language to describe model behaviour: hallucinations.

In From the other side of the bridge, Matt Webb defends the hallucination and points to countless examples of dreams that inspired individuals to discover novel ideas to generate considerable impact. He, like others, welcomes the spontaneous generation of ideas, even if they’re not rooted in reality.

He shares a word for this: a hyperstition, a

self-fulfilling idea that becomes real through its own existence.

When I see someone sharing a small project or prototype online now it invariably has the hallmark of AI-assisted development. I only have to look at the various tools and sites I’ve developed with Claude in the past year to understand why: for those with an idea and a Claude Code subscription¹ this is the golden age of side projects.

If, with some handwaving to the gods of continued progress, code is now free, any idea for an app or tool can exist simply by being imagined.

In his 2025 retrospective on the influential “An app can be a home cooked meal,” Robin Sloan invites the reader to rustle up their own further abuse of the analogy.

We’ve entered an era of app development as meal kit. It’s apt: a subscription service to reduce the friction of cooking a nutritious, satisfying meal. Critics point to packaging waste and atrophied skills, but the demand is real.

In this mania of creation, what happens to the original creators? The ones who inspired with the promise of an actual home-cooked meal (or just dessert)?

We’re wired to create. The path from problem to solution is lush and evergreen. The idea becomes the tool. By embracing the code-is-free lifestyle AI adopters chant as one: we build because we can.

Footnotes

1. s/Claude Code/your favourite coding assistant/g ↩