Note
Notes from Superhuge
13.07.26Published
What a time to be alive
Things I used to leave on a list are suddenly worth trying.
- Change
The first websites I made had loading bars.
They also had music nobody asked for, buttons that made noises, and enough animation to make a modern accessibility audit quietly close its laptop. This was the Flash era. Websites felt like odd little places you entered through a browser.
I loved it.
Making something for the internet took patience. First you had to learn the tool, then fight the tool, then discover that the tool had quietly corrupted the file. Today I can move from a note in my phone to working software in an afternoon. Artificial intelligence helps me write code, try a design, pull an idea apart, and start again. Still feels ridiculous.
Some weeks the whole thing is amazing. Other weeks it is another model, another launch, another person announcing that everything has changed forever. Again. Some of it is real. Some of it is a demo in a very nice jacket. I keep the excitement and the raised eyebrow in the same room.
But the distance between an idea and a real experiment has collapsed. Things I would once have left on a list because they were too expensive, technical, or annoying are suddenly worth trying.
What a time to be alive.
New tools, old assumptions
The moment
01 / Moment
It feels early again
The early web was messy because nobody knew what a website was supposed to be yet. Brochure? Magazine? Game? Shop? Personal diary with a visitor counter and a tiny dancing baby? Yes.
The lack of agreement was the fun part. The medium had not hardened into polite rectangles. You could take a wrong turn and accidentally find a new category.
The internet is not an empty field now. It is crowded, commercial, regulated, optimised, and full of very large companies protecting very large positions. Underneath all that, the tools are unstable again. New capabilities arrive before people have worked out what to do with the previous ones. Interfaces are being invented in public. Yesterday’s hard limit becomes today’s dropdown option.
The nonsense grows there too. A prototype can look finished before the thinking has started. A confident machine can be wrong in magnificent typography. A tool can save three hours and introduce six new ways to waste an afternoon.
I do not know if all of this is overhyped or underhyped. I am more interested in the old assumptions that have become soft enough to poke.
02 / Moment
So much is ready to change
Most unfinished things do not look unfinished. They look familiar.
We inherit a way of doing something, work around its awkward parts, and eventually forget the awkward parts are there. The workaround becomes the workflow. The workflow becomes a product category. A decade later somebody asks why it takes eleven clicks and the answer is basically: tradition.
I keep getting pulled toward those seams. A group chat can hold years of conversation and still be terrible at turning “we should do this” into somebody doing it. That sits underneath Selfso. Horse results are public, useful, and scattered across pages that were never meant to work together, so I started HorseScanner. Building a colour system involved the same checks over and over, so I made a workbench that shows the rules while you use them.
None began with a grand opportunity. They started with a smaller, more irritating question: why is this still so difficult?
Sometimes the answer is that the problem is hard. Sometimes software would make it worse. Sometimes the old way is old because it is human and good. We really do not need an app for everything. We have suffered enough.
Still plenty to make
The possibility
03 / Possibility
You are not late
The internet can make you feel late to everything. Every name is taken. Every idea has a landing page. Somebody in San Francisco has already raised money for it, pivoted twice, and started a podcast about the lessons.
Kevin Kelly wrote You Are Not Late in 2014, when the web already looked saturated. Plenty of people had arrived. The useful things had not all been invented.
That feels useful now. The cost of a first version has dropped. One person can cross more disciplines. Software can work with messier input. Ideas that were impractical a few years ago deserve another look.
Being early does not mean adding “AI-powered” to a normal product and waiting for the future to applaud. It means the useful shape is not obvious yet.
You can make one confusing process clearer or give somebody an afternoon back. Plenty of future for a Tuesday.
04 / Possibility
Optimism needs a verb
Zero to One makes a useful distinction. Vague optimism expects improvement. Definite optimism picks a direction and works on it.
You can borrow a useful tool without buying the whole shed.
My version is less grand. Start small. Make something real enough to disagree with you. Put it near the people it is meant for and pay attention.
A plan gives reality something to push against. That is more useful than waiting until you feel certain.
David Deutsch writes that problems become soluble through new knowledge. Marc Andreessen makes the louder case for building. Both are big ideas. I am usually looking for the entry point: what can I try today that tells me something tomorrow?
Choosing is the work
The work
05 / Work
The tools are not the point
Give someone a machine that can make code, copy, images, plans, presentations, and plausible opinions on demand, and something odd happens.
Making becomes easier. Deciding becomes harder.
There is always one more prompt. One more variation. One more agent waiting to produce one more dashboard showing the progress of all the other agents. Very efficient. Nobody remembers what the project was for, but the dashboard is lovely.
Speed can feel like movement without the inconvenience of going anywhere. The internet is filling with things that exist because they could be generated. Nobody stopped to ask if they were worth making.
The tool does not know what matters to me. It can point out a weak argument, but it does not feel the little warning when something is technically impressive and still wrong. It will happily polish the wrong thing all afternoon.
Taste is not magic. It comes from looking, choosing, being wrong, and trying again. Care still takes time when production gets fast.
Sometimes the sensible move is inefficient. Draw it by hand. Talk to the person. Walk the route. Cook dinner without turning it into a quantified performance system. The slower bit may be where the information is.
06 / Work
Make a move
Look at something around you that everybody treats as inevitable.
I mean the thing you keep stepping around. The spreadsheet nobody trusts. The group that wants to act but cannot coordinate. The useful information nobody can find.
Ask a slightly annoying question: do the old assumptions still hold?
Make the smallest version of an alternative and get it out of your head. Let somebody use it, reject it, improve it, or tell you the problem was somewhere else.
A sketch counts. A manual service counts. A conversation followed by a changed process counts. Software counts too, obviously. I remain extremely available for that option.
Then see what happens. Maybe it works. Maybe the old way was better. At least you know more than you did yesterday.
07 / Closing
Still unfinished
The tools are strange. The rules are soft. There is room.
Anyway. Back to making things.
Tim