The same AI tools changing the nature of day-to-day tech work are also helping some technologists pursue their passions outside of the typical nine-to-five.
Scott Pulkowski is a functional consultant by day, helping businesses build custom software systems, but in his free time, he’s an indie app developer. For him, experimenting with AI is as much about creative fulfillment as it is about sharpening the skills he uses at work.
“Right now, I would say, the real development and platform to build for is in the AI space,” Pulkowski told Technical.ly. “It’s building these micro tools, getting experience doing that, and then taking those lessons you learn from little tools and agents you build to then build bigger and bigger projects.”
“If you’re doing the same activity multiple times, day after day, build a tool for it and stop doing it yourself.”
Scott Pulkowski, indie developer
The Sewickley native was hooked on tech from an early age, building computers and websites as a child. He developed his first app with a friend in high school called Yinzer, a Pittsburghese dictionary that played the pronunciation of words in the regional dialect.
The experience got him thinking that maybe he could build things for other people too.
“Having access to the internet, being able to research and teach myself anything was pretty fundamental because once you teach yourself how to teach yourself and how to learn new things, you can pretty much figure out how to do anything,” Pulkowski said.
Pulkowski started a digital agency with his friend soon after and worked with clients throughout college, eventually graduating from Duquesne University in 2015 with a degree in entrepreneurship.
While he had dreams of continuing to build his own businesses, he eventually got a corporate job, which led him to learn about Salesforce — a platform used to manage a business’s interactions with customers — and it set him on the career path he’s still following today.
Working a full-time job hasn’t stopped him from building things that catch his eye, though. Recently, that’s been NertRush, a digital version of the popular card game Nerts, and InputOC, an app that allows USB devices to respond faster on Mac.
“Right now, I’m building these things for me,” Pulkowski said, “and then I hope somebody else will like them as well.”
In this edition of How I Got Here, Pulkowski talks about his motivations, how AI systems have changed his work and his advice to other developers entering tech today.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you decide what side projects to pursue?
If I think of something and I notice there’s a use case for it, then I just work towards it — an example being my game NertRush.
I was trying to show it to my friend and my friend wasn’t able to purchase the remove-ads feature of the game. I assumed the developer was no longer active and they couldn’t accept the new license agreements, so they can no longer sell products. Also, with the app, if you closed out the game and then went back to it, if you had the free version, it wouldn’t let you resume the game.
I told my friend and my sister that I’m just going to remake this game but not have any of those annoying features because that’s my go-to game on an airplane.
It’s the same thing for the USB project, InputOC. If I want to play a game on my laptop, my Apple is fast enough, but when you plug in a controller, it limits it to 250 hertz, and I play at 4,000 hertz, which is a massive difference you can feel. It’s just unplayable, so I was like: All right, screw it, I’m gonna build a solution.
How have AI tools changed your process?
AI changes my work so much. The first time I dabbled with AI tools was 2023, and I was doing Python coding. It was pretty good, and where it’s gotten since is insane. It’s nuts!
I’m definitely a power user. I started out using Claude about two years ago because it was the best at the time. To me, Claude seemed designed to burn tokens and cost you money. If you mix that with an incomplete understanding of what you’re asking it to do, then the cost can get out of control.
About three months ago, I switched to Codex and OpenAI’s models exclusively and have not looked back since. Now I have the top-tier Codex plan. It’s $200 a month. If you do the math of what it would cost to purchase those tokens outside of my monthly plan, I use about $2,000 to $3,000 a month worth of compute.
These companies will probably have to change these models to be much more economical soon, but until they fix that, I’m going to keep using them as much as I can.
Have AI tools caused job instability in your career or opened up more possibilities for you?
AI actually opens up a lot of possibilities because you do still need people to implement it.
Providing guidance from a project planning standpoint and managing developers — that’s really the value that we’re able to provide.
AI can automate some of the tasks, though. I try to preface it when I’m working with people: We’re going to try to get the mundane things and the things that you don’t want to do out of your life, so you can focus on the important things that we need you to work on.
I don’t want you working on something that takes four hours when we can get this system to do it in 30 minutes. I’d rather have you working on stuff we need a human brain for.
What advice would you give someone trying to get into app development?
Start small. You don’t even need to build on that original project, but it’s something that you can learn from. Maybe it snowballs into another project or you bring your skills to another idea.
Also, if you’re doing the same activity multiple times, day after day, build a tool for it and stop doing it yourself.
