The Build Board is brought to you by Bethany Crystal. Here are five things you can build this week, inspired by real problems on the ground at Build First. Every prompt follows POP-IT, the frame we teach in every session: Problem, Output, Prompt, Input, Test.
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🔨 The Build First Five:
5 Things to Build This Week, Inspired by Real Stories & Current Events
1. Something weird out of a book you love. The model stopped being the bottleneck. Your imagination is. Pick a public-domain text and build the strange thing only you'd think of. "Here's the full text of [book]. Build a single-page web app that [your weird idea, e.g. 'turns each chapter into a tarot card']. One HTML file. Ask one question if unclear, then build." Not sure where to start? Grab the complete works of William Shakespeare from Project Gutenberg.
2. A personal OS dashboard. Your whole financial picture in one view. "Here's my financial data [accounts, income, monthly expenses, balances]. Build a single-page dashboard showing my net worth, monthly cash flow, and a 12-month projection with a savings-rate slider I can drag. One HTML file, keep my data local." Test it: do the projections move when you drag the slider?
3. A tool out of the spreadsheet on your desk. Last month in Chicago, Build First led a room of 150 operators toward their first builds with Claude Code, using just a single data source. Turns out, the data you already touch daily is perfect raw material for an LLM. Try: "Here's a spreadsheet I work with [attach]. Build a small tool that does [what I do by hand]. One file, ask what's unclear first."
4. An agent for your most boring weekly task. Devpost found 1 in 4 hackathon projects is now an agent, and 97% of devs picked their own tools, not their company's. Stop waiting for permission. "Here's a task I do by hand every week: [task]. Draft a simple agent that does it start to finish, and list what you need from me first."
5. A machine-readable version of your work. As Cloudflare found, agents now drive 57.4% of web traffic, so your next reader is more likely to be a bot than a human. Start prepping your brand accordingly. Try: "Output this page as clean JSON an agent could read, then tell me what's missing for a machine to act on it."
Ship one tonight, then hit reply and tell me what you made. I read every one.
📍 From the ground floor
This is what it looks like when a room actually builds together.
Getting itchy to build something yourself?
→ Book time to chat with Build First about running your next hackathon or workshop