I've built a three-feature scheduling demo app in one weekend.
Is it fully tested and production ready? Of course not, it's been developed in a matter of hours. But it can answer a question most of my older projects I did with my friends failed to answer.
Almost all my friends have a new business idea and they come to me for implementation.
They have an idea of something that can be done better. Or they want to make something of their own based on their experiences so far. Before the AI and starter kit era, the question when we talked about it was "Will that actually solve the users' problem?" But we never got an answer because we couldn't build it fast enough to find out. Life, work and all the tedious things got in the way every single time.
That's because a weekend now differs greatly from a weekend one year ago.
What a weekend used to look like
It was purely groundwork.
Set up the project. Write the models and migrations. Maybe sketch some UI, render some data, get an overview of what the app could eventually become.
Not even one feature that can be demoed. Nothing a non-technical person could play around with, see what feels right and what should be discarded.
What a weekend looks like now
I set up a new Laravel project with the Vue.js starter kit, installed Laravel MCP and built some Claude feature agents for the core features:
Scheduling, AI tooling within the application, appointment codes, etc.
On Sunday night I had something tangible to show to my friend.
Why this matters
The bottleneck was never the idea. It was the distance between "I think this could work" and "let's find out."
And now we can finally get answers out of small projects to the question that matters in the first stage: "Will this actually solve the user's problem?"