I vibe code things that have no business existing. Here's why you should too.
This is an incomplete list of things I've built: A Saturday Night Live host and musical guest announcement card generator. A New Yorker cartoon generator. A way for strangers to send messages directly to a receipt printer in my house. A clone of Google Drive that I named Not Drive. A website where you can write obituaries for your failed startups. ChatGPT inside a virtual PDA. A website where strangers planned my month-long trip to San Francisco by voting on what I should do.
Nobody asked for any of these. I built them anyway.
People don't usually ask me directly, but I can tell they're thinking it: why would you spend your time on that?
The honest answer is that I don't know what's going to work. Nobody does. The SNL card generator and New Yorker cartoon generator both took off in ways I didn't expect. The receipt printer project brought thousands of strangers into my living room (metaphorically), sharing their fears and happiest moments and random snapshots of their day. Not Drive, which I built mostly because I thought it would be funny, won first place in a hackathon against 499 other entries. But Plan Maddie's Month has had three users. PDAChat and Launch Obituary have had only a few more.
I try to predict which of my projects will resonate, and I am very often wrong. The only way to really find out is to ship.
There's a certain freedom in building things nobody asked for. No market research. No competitive analysis. No one breathing down your neck asking about product-market fit. Just: wouldn't it be cool if this existed?
Launch Obituary exists because I thought it would be funny to hold a funeral for dead startups (and I have plenty of experience with failed startups, so I had material to work with). PDAChat exists because I wanted to see ChatGPT on a tiny screen. Plan Maddie's Month exists because I was curious what would happen if I let the internet decide my schedule.
None of these honestly solve real problems. But they did all teach me something! They all connected me with people. And honestly, they were all probably more fun to build than a "real" product would have been.
Here's what I've learned: the projects nobody asked for often end up being the ones people remember.
Useful tools become part of someone's workflow and might not always be top of mind: they're too useful. But a New Yorker cartoon generator? A way for people to pretend they're guest hosting their favorite TV show? A receipt printer that accepts messages from strangers? Those do stick out. People share them! People talk about them. People reach out to tell you how they made their day a little more interesting.
You honestly can't really manufacture that. You can only build things you genuinely think should exist and see what happens.
The other thing about building "useless" projects is that they might not actually be useless. Every weird thing I've built has taught me something I've used later. You're still building something, and the skills transfer. The ideas do compound, and one project leads to the next.
I think of it like this: your creative brain doesn't distinguish between "serious" projects and "silly" projects. It's all the same "Idea Muscle." The more you use it, the stronger it gets. The more weird things you build, the more ideas you have for everything else, when you're ready to build "The Idea."
So if you have an idea that feels too niche, too weird, too "who would even use this": you should try building it anyway!
Ship the thing nobody asked for. You might be surprised!