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Martyn Johnson

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Hey Martyn here.

I’ve been building things on the internet since the late 90s. Started out the same way a lot of people probably did back then, tinkering with early websites, figuring out how things worked, breaking things, fixing them, and generally making software do things it wasn’t originally designed to do.

I’ve always been more of a problem solver than anything else. If something annoys me or feels inefficient, my instinct is usually to try and build a way around it.

For most of that time I was a developer, mainly web and backend, but over the last year AI has completely changed how I work.

Honestly, AI can code faster and better than I can now, and I’m totally fine with that. It feels a bit like the industrial revolution for software. The bottleneck isn’t really coding anymore. It’s ideas, direction, planning, and figuring out what the right thing to build actually is.

So these days I spend more time thinking about problems, prompting, experimenting, and building things in slightly different ways than I used to.

Still an introvert, still a night builder, still constantly tinkering, just with very different tools.

Looking forward to seeing what everyone here is working on.

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Simon Wallace

Hey nice to meet you. My journey started similarly with geocities and flash games. AI has changed the way I code too, especially around testing and feature design. What's your current night build?

Martyn Johnson

@dr_simon_wallace Haha nice, Geocities takes me back.

My night builds now are basically short loops... idea/concept > prompt > prompt > working feature > test > iterate.

I’m shipping a lot smaller pieces, a lot faster than I used to. Less “sit and code for hours”, more “get something working and refine it”.

Feels like a completely different way of building compared to a year ago.

Simon Wallace
@martyn_johnson yeah so very different, yet eerily similar. I've now re entered my "not all code is good code" arc - funny how things are cyclical.
Martyn Johnson

@dr_simon_wallace I hear that! QA is still extremely important (more than ever arguably). That said, my QA process is 80% prompting now between Lovable and Github Copilot, and 20% manual review.

In all honesty, I easily do the work of a full team on my own these days.

Calvin Lim

Nice to Meet you! I never thought I would be a developer. Started my career in analytics, but slowly became invested in development. AI has definitely changed the way we build and solve problems! If I had AI in college, I wouldn't have spent 15 hours a week researching on Stack Overflow.

Martyn Johnson
@calvin_lim_1 Great to meet you too! Tell me about it, some times I miss those good old days, 3 days trying diffent solutions to a problem... endless hours on Stack Overflow and studying docs, apis, waking up in the middle of the night with that eurika moment. I don't think I'd go back though.
Sai Tharun Kakirala

Welcome to Product Hunt, Martyn! Your background sounds really similar to a lot of builders here — decades of solving problems and now using AI to completely change the workflow. The community here is great for getting feedback on what you are building. What are you working on right now? Would love to hear more!

Martyn Johnson

@sai_tharun_kakirala Appreciate that, Sai! yeah it definitely feels like a lot of us are going through a similar shift at the moment. Right now I’m working on something around turning ideas into actual structured plans. That gap between “I know what I want” and “what’s the best way to actually do it”.

Still early days, but it’s been interesting seeing how differently you can approach building now compared to even a year ago.