I built a Plane Spotter for my son in 120 seconds

My son is 18 months old, and he loves spotting planes in the sky. Every time he hears a plane engine sound, he starts looking up. The moment he spots it, he usually points his finger at it, and says something like “Hmm!” or “Pane!”

So since he likes them so much, and I know that plane positions are publicly available data, I figured it’d be a fun Sunday hack to make a script that gives us an alert every time a plane is overhead, so we can run out and find it.

It’s Sunday afternoon, I changed his diaper, handed him to his mother for a nap, and opened my laptop at 12:10 pm. I fired up ChatGPT, and asked “I want to build a tool that sends me a notification when a flight is visible above my house. Help me build this in NodeJS.”

Instantly, a NodeJS code was returned, complete with the proper API call, distance calculation function and notification system. Here it is for the nerds:

I entered my longitude/latitude, executed it, expecting the API call to most likely break, and to my pleasant surprise, it worked right away, alerting me of a plane nearby.

I looked at the time: 12:12 pm. It’s not even been 2 minutes, and I have a functional prototype of what was in my head. We live in WILD times.

Now, I could have done this myself, find the proper API, figure out how its response is structured, and calculate the distance between each response and my position. But this would have taken me 30 minutes. Instead, I got it done 30x faster.

And then, I thought: this is fun, let’s make it available from any device. So I asked:

Turn it all into a web app that people can enter their position longitude/latitude (or geolocate with the browser), radius, and then start getting temporary notification on page + sound with speech. I want it to be fully frontend. And it must be one HTML file, no dependencies.

This is what it returned

Pretty good for a first try! It’s ugly, but it works.

20 min later and after asking it to use modern design standards, come up with a name, and create more responsiveness in the interface, I ended up with this:

Here’s the link: https://planespotter.pages.dev

(If nothing shows up - there is no flight over head - or you might need to increase the radius. Probably works best on desktop too).

Now, I don’t expect many of you to care about such a tool. But I thought it was such an excellent example of how technology is making our ideas turn into reality faster. The edge is increasingly being placed not on your ability to perform the repetitive task, but on having the creative insight that is at the origin of new powerful ideas.

ChatGPT is great at executing, but it’s not so great at coming up with new ideas. A human connected to a path of authenticity is in prime position to receive treasures from the muses of creativity. And increasingly it’s going to be that ability to have the original insight, coupled with the capacity to communicate it clearly to the machine that is going to make the greatest difference. We’re essentially moving away from “raw” repetitive physical, and towards something akin to an “ethereal” creative labor.

What I mean is that we’re getting very close already to a situation where you envision a whole new idea, and can manifest it within a minute. Imagine envisioning Airbnb, and having its whole frontend and backend done within 1 minute. We’re not there yet, but we could be there soon. It could even figure out acquisition channels and start running self-evolving ads, or pivot on its own based on conversion rates.

This is where my curiosity goes: I wonder if as our machines get really smart, we’ll end up meditating in front of our computers, to try and figure out the most innovative and articulate query. In a world where most of the “work” can be executed instantly, it’s no longer about the work, it’s about the mental clarity necessary to enter the right query - and that, is the domain of mindfulness. Curious times.

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PS: If you want to use ChatGPT to improve your mindfulness, check out SageGPT. I’ve trained GPT on Taoist wisdom, and packaged it into a WhatsApp bot.