[CPU] I Re-opened My Patreon because...
Are you still living in technology's past?
https://chris.pirillo.com/rtfolio of the Future is a Living Network
First, remember: tomorrow evening is our next virtual event.
And, second… over the years, I’ve tried to build community platforms with other people, and I have a graveyard of databases to prove it. Most never went anywhere. Some suffered from the classic “empty room” problem: we built the space, but the conversation never quite stuck to the walls. We were trying to aggregate talk when we should have been aggregating creation.
And some just weren’t engineered very well (and I blame myself for those failures).
But I need something right now - and I’d wager others do as well. The social internet has fractured into a thousand walled gardens, making it impossible to see the full scope of what anyone is actually building. So, I’m crafting a social network predicated on a different model: we are all looking to build portfolios of what we’re making across the internet, giving us one place to connect and share not just our hot takes, but our output.
I don’t have a name for it yet, but it’s open to testers. You can see the early skeleton here: The Prototype (which I’ve dubbed ‘Gnomies’ for the time being):
I am building this using Mocha. It is a tool for non-technical users like me who dream of bigger things for themselves and others but don’t want to spend six months learning React. Mocha allows for “vibe coding” - where the barrier between the idea in your head and the application on the screen is just a sentence of natural language.
It’s solving problems, one click at a time.
However, innovation has a cost. I am currently out of credits for this month, which is halting development on the very platform I’m trying to share with you. If you believe in this vision of a creator-first social hub, I am asking for Donations to keep the servers spinning. Alternatively, I am re-opening my Patreon for those who want to support the long-term architecture of this community.
Donations: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=UMWCDWGVXVHZU
Patreon: https://patreon.com/ChrisPirillo
Calendar of the Uncanny
ctrl+alt+create live: Vibe Coding for Everybody - February 28, 2026 @ 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM | Seattle (In-Person) & Online - A “low stakes, high reward” workshop where anyone can learn to turn plain English into software—plus, one registered participant wins a $100 Amazon Gift Card.
Tomorrow evening! Here’s to hoping you can join us live? Maybe learn a thing or two about how you can start vibe coding stuff for yourself (your business, friends, or others in your community).
Insert Coin to Play: The Arcade is Open
I’m up to 230 apps now. This week? I’m most proud of…
But there’s also…
Bad Kanban | The Project Management Entropy Simulator
Experience the frustration of corporate project management in this satirical Kanban simulator. Features resisting cards, auto-scrambling layouts, and endless buzzwords.
Blob Snob - Interactive Procedural WebGL Visualization
Blob Snob is a real-time, interactive WebGL raymarching experiment. Manipulate procedural gyroid structures, color palettes, and animation speeds in your browser.
Cat Scratch
Cat Scratch is a reactive ASCII organism living in your browser. Hunt, purr, and play with this interactive digital toy.
Cyber Horizon
A procedural synthwave horizon generator. Create retro-futuristic 80s landscapes with neon grids, sunsets, and cityscapes in your browser.
Diamond Studio | 3D Gemstone Visualization & Analysis
A professional-grade physically based rendering (PBR) tool for gemological analysis. Visualize diamond cuts, clarity, color, and optical physics in real-time 3D.
Embroidery Lab - Realistic Stitch Simulator
Transform digital images into realistic embroidery simulations with Embroidery Lab. A browser-based WebGL tool for creating thread, stitch, and Aida cloth textures in real-time.
Feeling Salty - Procedural SEM Crystal Simulator
Explore ‘Feeling Salty’, a high-fidelity procedural cubic crystallization simulator. Generate realistic Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) visuals of salt-like structures with adjustable lighting, textures, and geometry.
Fractal Mantle - GPGPU Remix
A real-time WebGL fractal visualization tool. Explore infinite geometric variations with this interactive raymarcher and export high-resolution 4K wallpapers directly from your browser.
Holonet Uplink — Star Wars News, Podcasts & Feed Aggregator
Holonet Uplink aggregates Star Wars news, podcasts, and RSS feeds from dozens of galactic sources into a single real-time dashboard with filtering, search, and audio playback.
Infinity Cubes - Real-time Menger Sponge Fractal Visualization
Explore a real-time, raymarched Menger sponge fractal tunnel. An interactive WebGL visualization featuring customizable speed, rotation, and color palettes.
Laser Cursor Configurator - Custom High-Visibility Mouse Reticle
Configure and generate a custom, high-visibility laser cursor bookmarklet for your browser. Design a reticle overlay to ensure you never lose your mouse pointer again.
Lettuce Pray | Neural Lattice Visualizer - Interactive Raymarched Trigonometric Study
Explore Lettuce Pray, an interactive neural lattice visualizer. This web-based application uses raymarched trigonometric density studies to create immersive, evolving geometric structures in real-time.
Lava Lamp | Interactive 3D Simulation
Experience a relaxing 3D raymarched lava lamp with customizable colors, speeds, and shapes. Play online free. Design your perfect vibe today.
Luxstranded - Procedural Tunnel Visualizer
Explore an infinite, evolving procedural tunnel using real-time WebGL raymarching. Customize parameters, randomize patterns, and export 4K wallpapers.
Meeting Cost Tracker: Real-Time Office Waste Meter
Calculate the financial impact of meetings in real-time. Input hourly rates for attendees to see exactly how much money is being spent every second.
Messy Text: The Ultimate Zalgo Glitch Text Generator
Transform normal text into chaotic, glitched art with this Zalgo generator. Control distortion levels and copy messy text for social media or designs.
Other Oceans: Procedural Fractal Art Generator
Explore infinite generative spaces with Other Oceans. A WebGL2 playground for creating, customizing, and exporting high-resolution procedural fractal art.
Pool Party: Volumetric Raymarching Visualizer
Experience stunning real-time volumetric raymarching. Customize fractal complexity, distortion, and colors to create unique abstract 4K wallpapers.
Ready Steady Bang: Retro Quick Draw Duel
Test your reflexes in this Game Boy-style quick-draw duel. Wait for the BANG signal and fire first to win. Play solo or challenge a friend in 2P mode!
Rolling Hills Engine: Procedural Pixel Art Landscape Creator
Generate infinite rolling hills and dunal landscapes with this procedural engine. Customize lighting and themes to export 4K pixel art wallpapers.
Snakespin: 3D Gyroid Art Generator
Generate stunning 3D mathematical art with the Snakespin raymarching engine. Fully customize colors, lighting, and scales for high-res wallpaper export.
Storm Front | ASCII Weather Terminal: Retro Visual Forecast
Experience real-time global weather through a retro CRT terminal with dynamic ASCII art visualizations and detailed meteorological data.
Stratos Skysweeper: Volumetric Cloud Renderer
Create and customize stunning 3D volumetric clouds in real-time. A WebGL-powered simulation for interactive sky design and 4K wallpaper generation.
Tooltimate - 500+ Free Web Utilities & Developer Tools
Access over 500 essential, privacy-focused web tools in one beautiful glassomorphic interface. Includes converters, calculators, image editors, developer utilities, and security generators. Free and runs entirely in your browser.
Voronoi Vale: Organic GPU Art Generator
An interactive GPU-accelerated simulation creating organic Voronoi patterns with real-time physics, domain warping, and customizable visual styles.
Water Planet: Interactive WebGL Seascape Simulator
Explore a stunning real-time 3D ocean with Water Planet. Customize waves, lighting, and camera physics in this high-performance WebGL visualization.
Bookmarks from the Edge
Prom.dev | The GitHub for Prompts - We have reached the point where the instructions we give our tools are as valuable as the code they produce. Prom.dev is positioning itself as the “GitHub for Prompts,” treating your carefully crafted AI directives as versioned, shareable software artifacts. It’s an acknowledgment that in the age of vibe coding, the prompt is the source code.
Clonkbot | Tweet-to-App Deployment - This is a fascinating peek into the autonomous future. Clonkbot is a Twitter entity that claims to turn tweets directly into deployed applications on-chain. It is “shipping” apps instantly based on user requests, born just weeks ago and already boasting over a thousand generated utilities. It’s the ultimate reduction of the development cycle: you ask, and the machine provides.
ACE-Step 1.5 | The Open Source Suno Killer - The community has been waiting for a local, open-source alternative to the big music generation models, and it appears to have arrived. ACE-Step 1.5 is being hailed as a “Suno Killer” that can generate full songs in seconds on consumer hardware (like your Mac). It is a reminder that the gap between “proprietary magic” and “open source capability” is closing faster than anyone anticipated.
System Errors & Star Wars
I have started to view my own procrastination not as a character flaw, but as a system error. The dread I feel when facing a tedious task—data entry, email triage, formatting a newsletter—is usually a signal that I am acting like a robot when I should be acting like a human. We are not built for repetition; silicon is. When we force ourselves into those loops, our internal operating system throws an exception. We call it “laziness,” but it’s actually just a mismatch of hardware.
This became blindingly obvious to me yesterday evening. I got tired of waiting for someone else to build a decent Star Wars news aggregator, so I just did it myself. You can see the result here: Holonet Uplink. A year ago, building a real-time dashboard that parses RSS feeds and audio would have been a week-long project of debugging libraries and wrestling with CSS grids. With the current state of AI and “vibe coding,” it was a single evening’s entertainment. That is the shift: creation is becoming as fluid as thought.
The Empire is Crumbling. It’s Time to Build Your Own Lightsaber.
For the last twenty years, the entire software industry operated on a single, unspoken premise: The Walled Garden.
You know the feeling intimately. You buy a ticket to a platform - a project management tool, a note-taking app, a CRM - and it’s beautiful inside. The onboarding is slick. The interface is shiny. But the moment you try to do something the developers didn’t explicitly allow, you hit a wall.
Want to export your data in a specific format? No.
Want to connect this database to that calendar? Only if you pay for the Enterprise tier.
Want to change the way the dashboard looks? Submit a feature request and wait three years.
We accepted this because we had to. We were passengers in vehicles driven by product managers in San Francisco. We paid for the seat, sat down, and went exactly where they took us. We complained about the route, but we never touched the steering wheel.
But look around. The walls are coming down.
We are witnessing the rapid structural collapse of the “Walled Garden” business model. The arrival of abstracted AI agents and open standards like the new web-based Model Context Protocol (WebMCP) are dissolving the glue that held these monopolies together.
And for the first time in the history of computing, the power isn’t shifting to a different corporation. It’s shifting to you.
The End of the “Black Box” Era
Historically, software was a “Black Box.” You bought it, you used it, you didn’t ask questions. If the box didn’t do what you wanted, you were stuck. You couldn’t build your own solution because you didn’t know Python, SQL, or React. The barrier to entry was a four-year Computer Science degree.
That barrier just evaporated.
We are entering the era of Vibe Coding.
It sounds casual, but it represents a profound democratization of technology. “Vibe Coding” means building software by describing how it should feel and what it should do, using natural language. You provide the intent; the AI provides the syntax.
“I want a dashboard that pulls my emails from Client X and puts them on a calendar, but turns red if I haven’t replied in 24 hours.”
“Take all these messy invoices, rename them by date and amount, and put them in a folder.”
In the old world, that was a six-week development project requiring a backend engineer and a frontend designer. In the new world, that is a sentence you type into a chat window.
And it’s going to get easier and easier and easier for you to do, too.
Why the “Power User” is the New Engineer
If you have spent decades using software, you actually have an advantage over the engineers who built it.
You know the workflow. You know the pain points. You know exactly where the friction lives. You have the “domain expertise.” The only thing you lacked was the code.
Now, the code is a commodity. The vision is the asset.
The Empire - the legacy SaaS giants - relied on the fact that building your own tools was too hard. They counted on your helplessness. They built their moats on the assumption that you would never learn to swim. They assumed you would always tolerate a clumsy interface because migration was too painful.
And, as much as I love indie software devs, I no longer have to rely on them to do what it is that I want to do.
With AI agents acting as universal translators, data is becoming liquid. You can keep paying for the reliable storage and infrastructure (the “plumbing”), but you no longer have to accept the “house” they built on top of it.
You can essentially become your own product manager and developer simultaneously.
Don’t like the interface? Tell AI to build you a custom view that only shows what you care about. Strip away the bloat. Hide the upsell buttons. Make the font readable.
Data trapped in a silo? Use an AI tool to fetch it, reformat it, and display it where you actually work. The agent doesn’t care about proprietary file formats; it cares about meaning.
Tired of manual copy-pasting? Script an automation by simply telling your computer, “Do this every Tuesday.”
I’m not saying that’s a turnkey process today - but it will be very soon. I’m saying it’s quite possible to do today, and as usability continues to increase in agents… bam!
From Consumer to Composer
This shift changes the economic relationship entirely. We are moving from a world where you are a “User” - passive, consuming features as they are given to you - to a world where you are a “Composer.”
You don’t need to cancel your subscriptions to be a rebel. You just need to stop accepting their limitations. You can treat modern software not as a finished product, but as a bucket of LEGO bricks.
Think about the implications for your daily work.
Instead of fighting with a CRM that requires twelve clicks to log a call, you can build a tiny, one-button interface that does it for you. Instead of manually reconciling spreadsheets because “the integration is broken,” you can spin up an agent that handles the reconciliation while you sleep.
The companies that win in this new era won’t be the ones building higher walls. They will be the ones who give you the best bricks and get out of your way. They will realize that their job is to provide robust, reliable, open infrastructure - and let you build the castle.
This should be empowering to you - even outside of work (as an individual).
The Frontier is Open
This is the most exciting time to be a non-technical person in tech.
For years, you were told that “learning to code” was the only way to gain agency. That was a lie of omission. You didn’t need to learn syntax; you needed to learn logic. And if you’ve been navigating complex, broken corporate software for twenty years, your logic is already sharper than most junior developers.
The cockpit is open. The controls are in English.
And, once again, donations and/or patrons are welcome. ;)
Yours Digitally,