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The Doner Kebab Effect And The YouTube Algorithm

by | Oct 3, 2024 | The Journey | 0 comments

Okay, I think I meant the Dunning-Kruger effect. Maybe I’m just hungry and losing track of what I’m doing. Anyway, I recently posted about trying to come up with a better waitlist page for the app I’m working on with my college friend. I started using ChatGPT for that, and wow, I was blown away. I got excited and ended up distracting myself, trying to figure out how to design the app according to ChatGPT’s suggestions.

I’ve been exploring ways to be more efficient as a developer and figuring out how to leverage AI tools to boost my productivity. Naturally, I started looking at options like Galileo AI and Visily, which I found online. I even signed up for their paid plans—just to get a sense of their capabilities, at least for a month, since I don’t know anything about design.

And, well… look at this blog. If, by some miracle, you stumble upon this page in Q4 of 2024, you’ll see that I clearly have zero design experience. I hope that changes over time, but I’m not trying to become a top-notch UX designer. I just need to get the job done, and I can’t afford to hire a real designer right now.

As usual, I went down the rabbit hole—asking ChatGPT, watching YouTube tutorials, Googling everything. I went to bed kind of satisfied with myself, thinking that even if Galileo isn’t perfect, its basic design ideas, paired with Visily’s templates, might help. So I thought, “With ChatGPT’s help, I can copy and paste some outputs into other AI tools, and boom—Bob’s your uncle.”

Then, in the morning, I came across this video giving a quick overview of differences in quality of a design… And I realized there’s much more to a good design than what a quick AI generated screen and a template can do:

 

Then I came across another YouTube video. I won’t post it here because I didn’t see much value in it, the guy in the video claimed he could build an entire application using just simple tools. It was only 10 minutes long, so I watched it. Turns out he was using Midjourney, which is awesome for image generation, but I noticed he didn’t talk about the entire app development process—just the visuals. I realized I’d fallen for yet another flashy title on YouTube that promises to build entire apps quickly, with no code and some AI magic.

And it’s not just this guy. There are so many YouTubers and blog posts out there, all claiming you can build a SaaS product super fast with AI and no coding experience. They say you can get your first business off the ground in a weekend and replace your day job in no time. I get that they’re trying to show that starting a business can be simpler than we think—not necessarily easier or faster, but more accessible, but in the end a lot of that oversimplifies things and leads people (like me) to think that it’s all a walk in the park.

I’m convinced there are no shortcuts, though. There’s no quick and easy AI tool that will magically build my app, launch my business, and make me a millionaire overnight. It just doesn’t work that way. Even with all the AI tools, templates, and guidance from ChatGPT, I’ve still got a ton of hard work ahead of me.

So, what now? I guess I need to be aware of this and not just blindly follow what ChatGPT, YouTube, or Google put in front of me. Funny enough, the moment I started Googling for design tips, YouTube began flooding me with “how to design an app” suggestions. I realize now that my learning journey is partly at the mercy of these algorithms, and you know what? For now, I’m okay with that.

A while back, I read Where Good Ideas Come From, and one concept really stuck with me: the “adjacent possible.” It’s about how progress always comes from the next step beyond what’s currently possible. It’s such an obvious idea, but when you think about it, it means that even in my situation, I’ll only get better at discerning good information and becoming more efficient by just doing the work and pushing the boundary of my current capabilities. I can’t give up and assume that all information out there is the same, or that I’ll never come up with anything original. I just have to keep at it—learn enough to recognize what’s useful, get better at basic design, and eventually hire a real designer who can do it better than I can.

So yeah, once again, I have no idea what I’m doing, but I know I have to keep moving forward. There’s a lot of work and effort ahead.

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