Small Stools Everywhere

Nights of DIY product-making

A column in TMTPost by 啸天's AILab captures a new, quiet phenomenon in China's tech life: white‑collar workers in their thirties who spend evenings building tiny projects — one‑person mini apps, two‑level games, short videos, scraping-and-automation tools. TMTPost reported these side projects often have little immediate commercial value, yet the people behind them keep going. Why? Because the cost of experimentation has collapsed and the feedback loop is addictive: you can ship a rough prototype tonight and learn by doing.

Small benches as a skills factory

Call it the "small bench" theory. These artifacts—bare, imperfect, often unseen—are not meaningless. They teach concrete skills: how to wire an API, automate a workflow, or cut a watchable short video. The column contrasts this wave with the 2014–2016 mobile‑internet startup frenzy, when buzzwords and slide decks often outpaced hands‑on capability. This time the excitement is different. It’s tangible. You don’t just talk about building a product; you actually build something, repeatedly. The cumulative effect: practitioners develop "hand feel" that transforms how they see and decompose problems.

Geopolitical context and tooling constraints

This grassroots maker culture is unfolding inside a complex geopolitical landscape. It has been reported that U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips and other trade policies have tightened hardware access for Chinese firms, nudging developers toward software innovation and domestic toolchains. At the same time, large Chinese cloud and platform ecosystems — from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) and Tencent (腾讯) to Baidu (百度) — plus readily available models and libraries, lower the barrier to prototyping. The result is a paradox: external constraints plus abundant local tooling are driving more bottom‑up experimentation, not less.

Why it matters

Are these late‑night benches just hobby projects? Maybe. But the column’s core argument is strategic: quantity begets capability. People with dozens of small experiments are several orders of magnitude more able to turn an idea into a working minimum viable product than those with only theory and plans. For managers and investors watching China’s AI and creator ecosystems, that matters — because tomorrow’s commercially viable sofas may well be stacking up tonight on a floor full of small stools.