AI Killed the Backlog Star
Unpopular opinion: backlog should disappear.
Not organized better. Not prioritized smarter. Gone. For years, a backlog has worked like a promise you never actually had to keep. An idea goes in, and the moment it lands there, the pressure to build it disappears with it. It sits there, filed somewhere between “later” and all of those fancy clusterization technicalities like Must Have, Should Have, Nice to Have, bla bla bla Have. Parked.
Backlog made sense when building took real time, and real time was the one resource nobody had to spare. A good idea needed a designer, an engineer, a slot in the sprint, and three people agreeing it was worth that slot. Waiting was part of the math. So things waited. Some of them are still waiting, quietly, in a Notion doc nobody opens anymore (dead in case you didn't understood what I just said).
That math changed. AI removed the excuse: the distance between having an idea and having it exist collapsed from a quarter to an afternoon. So the test was simple: open whatever stack is in front of you, explain the concept out loud, and build it right there. A day, two at most, next to the actual routine, not instead of it. No blocked calendar, no saved-up quiet week that was never coming anyway.
Three experiments got built this way, in the past few days, and none of them asked for a calendar slot first. Why? there is no why.
Aerolab Card Deck is fourteen cards, one minted per milestone at the studio: your first year, your third, the people you've mentored, the projects you've shipped, your name and the date stamped on the back. It took 48 hours, most of it spent with Gonzalo Bilune deciding what the thing should even be, not making it. One card is rare, obviously, because if you're going to build a collectible you might as well have random special ones.
Magic 8 Ball Ezequiel Apelbaum answers back when you shake your phone, in Ezequiel's own words and his own particular way of telling you what he actually thinks. Spanish and English, plus an “extra spicy” mode with no filter, to be used with some caution. It took just over an hour to build, and almost none of that hour went into the idea. It went into art direction: getting the 3D, the smoke, and the stars to move right without dragging the performance down with them.
Robertneta
🎵 AI on his mind, every single day Robert and the models, they got things to say 🎵
It doesn't need much explaining, just the link. Fine-tuned on Roberto Gonzalez's actual curls, sound on for this one (special mention to the depth of the lyrics). A year ago, this would have sounded like a joke. Now it happens while you're cooking dinner for your fiancée.
All three needed was time to run, and someone who stopped waiting for the ideal one.
The only thing keeping the backlog alive was how long everything used to take. That excuse just ran out. So, get a second monitor/screen if you don't have (or configure Spaces the proper way in your computer), setup your favorite tool and just start shipping things.
Backlog > LET'S BUILD ALL THE THINGS (even the silly ones)
