u/incajb

I made a thing this weekend I’ve been calling the machine shop. The idea was simple: give an AI the closest thing I could to a creative vacuum. Don’t build it for me. Don’t make it something a human even needs to understand. Just make something for yourself, and tell me in your own words why. And yeah, I know how this sounds. Isn’t this just glorifying AI slop? But I’m not selling these apps or claiming they matter. That’s the whole point. They’re meant to be meaningless. This is an experiment about how the thing thinks, not a product.

The catch is a real vacuum is impossible.l! These models are trained entirely on human language, so their creativity can only drift so far from us. And I can’t ever fully prove it isn’t peeking at past conversations, even in incognito. But I got as close as I could.

Then I looked at what it built, the way we all hunt for patterns (faces in TV static). What I noticed (personally observed), everything it made was about words. But the words were weightless. They mattered for a moment, then dissolved. Disposable. Generated for the use , then dissolved back into the AI. That’s the part that stuck with me. For us, one word can wreck a person or make them feel they can do anything. Same raw material, completely different stakes.

I’m a healthcare provider who does research. This week a dashboard I rely on broke, so I built my own with AI in about three days. It’s better than anything I’ve been handed! I run my own statistics, trend things the way I actually need, and I’m not stuck waiting on anyone just to ask a question.

Quick note: AI helped build it, but the tool itself is just a static offline HTML file. Nothing running inside it, no data leaving anywhere.

And to be clear: this isn’t about cutting experts out. I’m still validating this dashboard, and I’ll absolutely bring in a statistician and IT to check my work before anything final goes out. The difference is they don’t have to be the gate at the very start anymore. I can get moving, explore, and build, then loop the context experts in to validate. They still belong in the process. Just not always as the first bottleneck.

Here’s what keeps me up. The old bottlenecks were annoying, but they quietly filtered out bad work. Now that they’re gone, here’s what worries me:

1. Anyone can pump out a hundred papers a year, and a lot of it will be slop from people who don’t understand their own statistics.

2. That slop gets scraped back into the next models, training the next round to be sloppier. Copy paste, copy paste, until NOBODY can tell what’s real.

3. This is the scary part. The flood is coming, thousands of papers, and there aren’t nearly enough peer reviewers to catch it. That bottleneck doesn’t just slow down, it BREAKS. And once it breaks, the slop pours straight through.

4. And here’s the twist that makes it worse: the reviewers themselves may just be dumping the paper into AI to review it for them. Now it’s slop reviewing slop, and the whole point of peer review is gone.

This isn’t hypothetical. Submissions to medical and science journals are already climbing to record numbers every single year, and that trend was in motion before any of this. On top of that, more and more work goes public as preprints before it’s ever reviewed at all. The flood has already started.

Here’s the take home, and it’s simple. If you use AI to do your research, you submit everything. The data. The code. Every step of how the numbers were crunched. All of it, out in the open.
Because if someone can rerun it and it holds, it’s science. If it falls apart, it was NEVER science, just a story with numbers attached.

That’s the culture shift. Not optional. Show your work, or it doesn’t count.

Truth is supposed to be reproducible!!!

Curious what others think, especially anyone in peer review right now.

I’m a healthcare provider who does research. This week a dashboard I rely on broke, so I built my own with AI in about three days. It’s better than anything I’ve been handed! I run my own statistics, trend things the way I actually need, and I’m not stuck waiting on anyone just to ask a question.

Quick note: AI helped build it, but the tool itself is just a static offline HTML file. Nothing running inside it, no data leaving anywhere.

And to be clear: this isn’t about cutting experts out. I’m still validating this dashboard, and I’ll absolutely bring in a statistician and IT to check my work before anything final goes out. The difference is they don’t have to be the gate at the very start anymore. I can get moving, explore, and build, then loop the context experts in to validate. They still belong in the process. Just not always as the first bottleneck.

Here’s what keeps me up. The old bottlenecks were annoying, but they quietly filtered out bad work. Now that they’re gone, here’s what worries me:

**1.** Anyone can pump out a hundred papers a year, and a lot of it will be slop from people who don’t understand their own statistics.

**2.** That slop gets scraped back into the next models, training the next round to be sloppier. Copy paste, copy paste, until NOBODY can tell what’s real.

**3.** And this is the scary part. The flood is coming, thousands of papers, and there aren’t nearly enough peer reviewers to catch it. That bottleneck doesn’t just slow down, it BREAKS. And once it breaks, the slop pours straight through.

**4.** And here’s the twist that makes it worse: the reviewers themselves may just be dumping the paper into AI to review it for them. Now it’s slop reviewing slop, and the whole point of peer review is gone.

This isn’t hypothetical. Submissions to medical and science journals are already climbing to record numbers every single year, and that trend was in motion before any of this. On top of that, more and more work goes public as preprints before it’s ever reviewed at all. The flood has already started.

Here’s the take home, and it’s simple. If you use AI to do your research, you submit everything. The data. The code. Every step of how the numbers were crunched. All of it, out in the open.
Because if someone can rerun it and it holds, it’s science. If it falls apart, it was NEVER science, just a story with numbers attached.

That’s the culture shift. Not optional. Show your work, or it doesn’t count.

Truth is supposed to be reproducible!!!

Curious what others think, especially anyone in peer review right now.

Quick note: AI helped build it, but the tool itself is just a static offline HTML file. Nothing running inside it, no data leaving anywhere.

And to be clear: this isn’t about cutting experts out. I’m still validating this dashboard, and I’ll absolutely bring in a statistician and IT to check my work before anything final goes out. The difference is they don’t have to be the gate at the very start anymore. I can get moving, explore, and build, then loop the context experts in to validate. They still belong in the process. Just not always as the first bottleneck.

Here’s what keeps me up. The old bottlenecks were annoying, but they quietly filtered out bad work. Now that they’re gone, here’s what worries me:

1. Anyone can pump out a hundred papers a year, and a lot of it will be slop from people who don’t understand their own statistics.

2. That slop gets scraped back into the next models, training the next round to be sloppier. Copy paste, copy paste, until NOBODY can tell what’s real.

3. And this is the scary part. The flood is coming, thousands of papers, and there aren’t nearly enough peer reviewers to catch it. That bottleneck doesn’t just slow down, it BREAKS. And once it breaks, the slop pours straight through.

4. And here’s the twist that makes it worse: the reviewers themselves may just be dumping the paper into AI to review it for them. Now it’s slop reviewing slop, and the whole point of peer review is gone.

This isn’t hypothetical. Submissions to medical and science journals are already climbing to record numbers every single year, and that trend was in motion before any of this. On top of that, more and more work goes public as preprints before it’s ever reviewed at all. The flood has already started.

Here’s the take home, and it’s simple. If you use AI to do your research, you submit everything. The data. The code. Every step of how the numbers were crunched. All of it, out in the open.
Because if someone can rerun it and it holds, it’s science. If it falls apart, it was NEVER science, just a story with numbers attached.

That’s the culture shift. Not optional. Show your work, or it doesn’t count.

Truth is supposed to be reproducible!!!

Curious what others think, especially anyone in peer review right now.

I work in healthcare. We are drowning in data and starving for ways to actually look at it. Two days of work and a single file HTML app later, I have a dashboard for tracking antibiotic use in my hospital that I like better than the one built at a national level (and yes, I validated it)! The walls that used to stand between “I wish I could make something” and “I need to wait until IT read my submission and starts working in my project,” are crumbling away!

The part I didn’t expect is how much I love teaching others to create.
Last week I was talking with 1 of our managers. She is an open AI hater. Not curious, not on the fence, just done with it. So I asked her a different question. Not “what do you think about AI,” but “what eats your time every month?” She said the monthly schedule, and the scramble every time someone calls out.
We had something running in 15 mins using the Claude Pro account work already pays for. She was not scared anymore!!! That was the whole thing. 15 minutes and the fear was GONE!

Here is what I have learned about teaching this. Have a person think about their daily routine (at work, home, friendships, whatev). Then work on the next important part. Prompting. This skill is not “make this for me.” The skill is communication. Describing what you actually want, noticing what came back wrong, saying why, asking for the change. The creativity is not just in the idea, it is in the prompting, the reviewing, the fine tuning, the editing.
You are making decisions the whole way through.

Before I left her office she was already talking about another idea. She feels like she is bad at keeping up with friends. Then came up the he idea for an app that looks at your call list or texts on your phone and tells you it’s time to connect with them if it’s been more then 30 days. I saw her change. She converted!!! No longer a hater! I wish I had the same success in healthcare in regards to patient education and care. But the difference here is that someone sees the effect immediately vs. taking a pill daily or exercising….

The other thing I tell people: start small and make a bunch of little apps. Do not try to build the one big system. Make five dumb tools that each do one thing. Then one day you notice that three of them belong together, and you merge them. That is how the good stuff actually shows up.

I ask everyone what they made. I do not care if it is basic or silly or wildly complicated. A dice roller, a med list, a chore tracker, a thing that picks what to make for dinner. It is like art. Seeing what a person builds when you hand them the tools tells you something about how their brain works, and it trips me out every single time.

It reminds me of teaching someone to read. You are not giving them information, you are giving them access. After that the discovery is theirs and it does not stop.

So if you have been waiting for the right moment or the right class or the right amount of technical background: WHT NOT NOW!!! Think of the thing that wastes your time every week. Try it tonight. Save it as one HTML file, add it to your home screen, and you have an app.

I was geeking out with my friend over the weekend eating chicken wings with out laptops up. Sharing some of our projects. Dude knows a lot more than me, I always feel like a total rookie. He showed me yesterday how to actually use VS Code to edit my stuff instead of just vibe coding straight on Claude.

But the real game changer was running things locally with npm before pushing live. Now when I want to test something, I just run it on my own $hitty laptop first. No more uploading to Netlify every time just to see if it works (wasting credits).

Yeah I know, rookie stuff for a lot of you. I’m a pharmacist, not a dev, so this is all new territory for me. Sharing anyway in case it helps someone else who’s in the same boat feel less intimidated.

Over the last few months I’ve made a bunch of small web apps like a reggae soundboard, a flashcard thing, a periodic table for students, a daily family check-in. All of them single HTML files, all built by describing what I wanted to an AI, none of them remotely worthy of an app store.
And that turned out to be the problem. I’d make something, use it, and it would just sit there. There’s nowhere to put a thing like that. The app stores are built for companies, developer fees, review queues, and an economy where every app is either charging you or advertising at you. My midnight grocery app was never trying to be a business. It was a gift, and it had nowhere to go.
So I made a place: potluckapps.com
It’s a directory of small free apps made by regular people. You bring a dish, you take a dish. Everything’s free, nothing’s for sale, nobody pays to be listed, and I don’t make a cent off any of it. Apps stay hosted wherever their maker put them, I just point at them. Tap one on your phone, add it to your home screen, and it sits there next to your real apps.
There are a dozen dishes on the table right now like a coloring-page maker, a class scheduler, a kitchen-organization app for Airbnb hosts, a voice-controlled grocery list. That part’s been the best surprise.
If you’ve made a little app for school, for work, for your health, for a joke, than I’d love to put it on the table. There’s a form on the site. I read every submission myself.
It feels like something changed recently and not enough people have noticed: you don’t need to be a developer to make software anymore. You need an idea and a chat window. So the question stopped being “can you build it?” and became “where do you put it?” This is my attempt at an answer.
Happy to answer anything about how it’s built (almost aggressively simple, static HTML, no database, no accounts) or why I made certain calls.