Who else is building their own AI moat and drawbridge?
(Automatically translated from Dutch)
For about 20 years now, an army of programmers has been working on the algorithms that hack my dopamine system. These days with help from agents. The content keeps getting more refined too, again sped up by AI. A whole army against me alone. I can’t win that.
But now I have AI too. With tips from my agents and from real people, I dug a moat around my phone in a few clear moments. First I built an alternative to LinkedIn, YouTube and X. That worked pretty well for a first try. My personal trainer swears by Opal, so I tried that too. A few weeks of awareness with Opal later, I threw all social and video apps off my phone. Then the browser turned out to be a back door to YouTube Shorts. One clear moment and one prompt later, that’s behind the moat too.
Don’t I miss all kinds of things? Yes, actually I do. News from outside the NOS and NU.nl bubbles. Who has a new job? Who started a new company? Whose birthday is coming up? Honestly, I was already missing 80% of it, because it was buried between AI slop and clickbait. But then, I have my own small army of AI agents, so why accept this?
In a few hours of vibecoding with Claude I built a drawbridge: my own news system that only lets in news from my people. It doesn’t work all that smoothly yet, but that’s good. I actually think a bit of friction is a good thing in such an addictive system.
Claude wanted to build everything from scratch, but when I called it out on that, there turned out to be a whole suite of open source tools, built by people who had this frustration much longer. I think I’m part of a movement.
LinkedIn, X and YouTube are no longer on my phone. My own server only pulls in what I want to follow, with FreshRSS and Pinchflat. On my phone I check what’s new in NetNewsWire when I feel like it. A video I want to watch I send to Jellyfin, or I just listen to the audio without ads through Audiobookshelf. It all works and I still rarely use it, because it’s not as user-friendly as the platforms. Great, right?
Who else is building their own moat and drawbridge? And what does it get you? Updates on friends, clients and business contacts you would otherwise have missed? Or hours of your time back for something more important?
Building something yourself too? For yourself and for your business? My monthly club of 5 vibecoding entrepreneurs is looking for one more. See also Vibecoding business owner? My little ‘club’ of 4 vibecoding entrepreneurs is looking for 1 or 2 more pioneers who enjoy learning from each other