"What Should I Build?" — A Generator for Your First AI Project

Everyone who gets excited about building with AI hits the same wall in the first week: what do I actually build?

Pick something too big and you'll abandon it. Too trivial and you'll learn nothing and quit. The sweet spot — small enough to finish this week, useful enough that you'll keep using it — is where the habit forms. Every project in Creating with Claude lives in that zone, and this generator helps you find yours.

How it works

The Idea Generator starts from your life, not from a list of someone else's projects. It walks you through the prompts that surface good candidates: What do you re-type every week? What question do people keep asking you? What number do you calculate by hand? What document do you dread producing?

Then it helps you score each candidate on two axes — effort to build and payoff when built — and the winner is usually obvious by the end of the page. Not the coolest idea. The one you'll finish.

Your first build matters more than you think

The first thing you build with AI does something subtle: it recalibrates what you believe you're capable of. After the first working tool — even a tiny one — the question stops being "can I do this?" and becomes "what's next?" That shift is worth more than any individual project.

Print the generator, pour a coffee, and give it twenty minutes. You'll leave with your first project chosen — and if you want a guide for the build itself, you know where the book is.