Building small tools to test an idea

I posted an Instagram carousel maker and asked whether I should open-source it. That public update describes an experiment, not a released product or a measured result.

The useful idea behind it is broader: a small tool can make a product question concrete.

Build around one piece of work

A carousel has a simple job. It turns a sequence of points into a set of readable slides.

A focused prototype can ask whether the same spacing, type hierarchy and layout rules are useful across several slides. It can also reveal where a template stops helping: a long title, a code example or an image with an awkward crop.

Those are clearer questions than whether a general-purpose design tool should have another feature.

Make the output easy to react to

A description asks someone to imagine an interaction. A working output gives them something to inspect.

For a carousel maker, that output could be a short sequence of slides. Feedback can then become specific: the heading is too small, a slide needs fewer words, or the export does not fit the platform.

The prototype does not need to solve every case to reveal the next constraint.

Keep the experiment’s status visible

Showing something in public creates expectations. A clear label helps distinguish a prototype, an open-source package and a product that someone can use today.

The question in my post was whether to open-source the experiment. It should not be read as a claim that the tool has already been released.

That distinction lets the work stay exploratory while still making it useful to discuss.

Let an idea earn its next step

A useful next step might be a smaller scope, another iteration or simply a note about what did not work.

The larger projects in my workshop, such as Nuxt Charts, also started with a specific problem. A prototype provides a way to understand that problem before committing to a much larger system.

See small experiments for the place these ideas occupy alongside the bigger projects.