Everyone and their mom are making startups. I scroll for five minutes and it’s stealth AI founders, building-in-public threads, $1k pre-seed announcements, and 21-year-olds talking about if theyre gonna make an exit. Somewhere along the way, we forgot something simple: build things for the love of it.
Not everything has to be monetized. Not every project needs a landing page, a waitlist, and a pricing tier. Not every GitHub repo needs to hint at “future revenue streams.” There’s this quiet but constant pressure now, especially in CS, that if what you’re building doesn’t “solve a problem”, which usually just means “can this make money?”, then it’s not worth your time. That’s such a narrow way to think about software.
It’s 2026 and somehow students feel like they don’t have time to learn anymore. That’s the part that’s wild to me. Not everything has to be a startup. Sometimes you should just build something because it makes your brain light up.
#bringbackbuilding