I’d like to share a tip for getting more practice building with AI — that is, either using AI building blocks to build applications or using AI coding assistance to create powerful applications quickly: If you find yourself with only limited time to build, reduce the scope of your project until you can build something in whatever time you do have. If you have only an hour, find a small component of an idea that you're excited about that you can build in an hour. With modern coding assistants like Anthropic’s Claude Code (my favorite dev tool right now), you might be surprised at how much you can do even in short periods of time! This gets you going, and you can always continue the project later. To become good at building with AI, most people must (i) learn relevant techniques, for example by taking online AI courses, and (ii) practice building. I know developers who noodle on ideas for months without actually building anything — I’ve done this too! — because we feel we don’t have time to get started. If you find yourself in this position, I encourage you to keep cutting the initial project scope until you identify a small component you can build right away. Let me illustrate with an example — one of my many small, fun weekend projects that might never go anywhere, but that I’m glad I did. Here’s the idea: Many people fear public speaking. And public speaking is challenging to practice, because it's hard to organize an audience. So I thought it would be interesting to build an audience simulator to provide a digital audience of dozens to hundreds of virtual people on a computer monitor and let a user practice by speaking to them. One Saturday afternoon, I found myself in a coffee shop with a couple of hours to spare and decided to give the audience simulator a shot. My familiarity with graphics coding is limited, so instead of building a complex simulator of a large audience and writing AI software to simulate appropriate audience responses, I decided to cut scope significantly to (a) simulating an audience of one person (which I could replicate later to simulate N persons), (b) omitting AI and letting a human operator manually select the reaction of the simulated audience (similar to Wizard of Oz prototyping), and (c) implementing the graphics using a simple 2D avatar. Using a mix of several coding assistants, I built a basic version in the time I had. The avatar could move subtly and blink, but otherwise it used basic graphics. Even though it fell far short of a sophisticated audience simulator, I am glad I built this. In addition to moving the project forward and letting me explore different designs, it advanced my knowledge of basic graphics. Further, having this crude prototype to show friends helped me get user feedback that shaped my views on the product idea. I have on my laptop a list of ideas of things that I think would be interesting to build. Most of them would take much longer than the handful of hours I might have to try something on a given day, but by cutting their scope, I can get going, and the initial progress on a project helps me decide if it’s worth further investment. As a bonus, hacking on a wide variety of applications helps me practice a wide range of skills. But most importantly, this gets an idea out of my head and potentially in front of prospective users for feedback that lets the project move faster. [Original text: deeplearning.ai/the-batch/is… ]