It hit me this morning, hunched over my laptop in the back of my modified Toyota Camry. No coffee for me—never have been one for it—but the dawn light filtering through the tinted windows did the trick. I'd gutted the interior a couple years back: yanked the seats for a makeshift desk setup, added some foam padding and a fold-out table. It's not glamorous, but it's mobile, quiet, and zero rent. Perfect for these stray thoughts on tech.
We've spent decades stacking apps like WordPress on top of databases, all to wrangle human inputs into something searchable. Blogs, CRMs, endless SaaS layers—each one a bridge from messy ideas to structured data. It made sense back then: empower the non-coders, scale the chaos. But man, the overhead. Plugins that break on updates, API mazes that eat weekends, dashboards nobody remembers how to use.
Then AI shows up, and prompts become the new UI. "Summarize my notes by theme and flag the weird ones." Done. No forms, no logins, just intent translated on the fly. Why maintain the fortress when you can whisper the siege?
Key observation: A lot of this stuff doesn't even need a database anymore. Seriously. We're talking flat files—good old text docs, CSVs, Markdown sprawl. With AI, retrieval's not about rigid schemas; it's semantic search across loose piles. Embed your ramblings in a vector store, query with natural language, and boom: your personal wiki without the WordPress cruft.
Here's what that looks like in practice, from my Camry experiments:
- Input freedom: Ditch the structured forms. Voice-note your thoughts into a flat file; AI parses, tags, and links without a backend.
- Retrieval rethink: No more SQL gymnastics. Prompt for "connections between my Q3 notes and that startup pitch," and it surfaces patterns across files.
- Scale without servers: For solo or small ops, why pay for hosted DBs? Local AI tools like Ollama handle the heavy lifting on your machine—or in my case, a beefed-up tablet rigged to the dash.
- Edge cases? Minimal: Sure, audit for hallucinations, but that's lighter than debugging a full-stack app.
Reflections for the day: This isn't just simplification; it's unbundling the accidental complexity we normalized. Back to basics, but smarter. Flat files feel liberating—like trading a suit for jeans. Next up: prototyping a prompt-driven note system in my rolling office. If it sticks, maybe it'll outlast the Camry's mileage.
What about you—ready to flatten your stack?