Idea to Implementation

Step 1: Define IN and OUT

• Think of your problem and define what's the Input and what's the Output. For example, for an application that helps you digest AI research papers, IN can be an AI research paper and OUT can be key findings.

Step 2: Connect IN to OUT

• Think of the simplest way for a user to can get the output from the input, even if the output isn't great. In the AI research paper example, this would entail building a website that can take in a pdf, extracting text from a pdf, feeding that pdf to a Large Language Model, and then displaying the output to the user.

Step 3: Iterate

• Once you've connected IN to OUT, you've proved that the technical flow works. It's now your job to keep improving each stage of the process until OUT is where you want it to be!

Rationale

Technical problems that have a lot of jargon can be scary. Defining IN and OUT helps ground yourself in the application of technology and helps you bring a scary, jargon-dense problem into smaller bite-sized parts (e.g. uploading a pdf, extracting text from a pdf, connecting to an LLM provider, etc...).