A few years ago, a friend of mine was stuck. He needed to quickly process over a hundred high-quality images according to a complicated sequence. He was using Photoshop, but it was going to take him days. Initially, he asked for my help, could I do the manual labor? I spent 15 minutes writing a script with ImageMagick that processed all the images in seconds, but in a completely automated way.
When my kids were young, instead of helping them study algebra and grammar, I wrote small JavaScript apps for them to use. I built a small collection of educational tools.
The great success story of AI for me is exactly this: AI helps you write your own tools, faster and better.
Last night, I was struggling with videos I had to process. I wanted to add nice subtitles to them. There are software applications for that, but they require manual labor and don’t always work the way I want them to. After a long night, I had an insight: why don’t I ask my AI to help build the automated tool I need? So I did—and it worked really well, very quickly. So what’s the lesson here? Maybe that we should spend more time building our own software for our own personal use than we used to.
Daniel Lemire, "Using AI to build your own software," in Daniel Lemire's blog, July 16, 2026, https://lemire.me/blog/2026/07/16/using-ai-to-build-your-own-software/.
https://lemire.me/blog/2026/07/16/using-ai-to-build-your-own-software/'> [BibTeX]