What if creating useful software for your community required clarity of intent, not technical fluency?

11 Feb

There is a widening gap between what technology makes possible and what most people can actually create.

We can generate interfaces, automate workflows, and spin up software faster than ever. But the leap from “this is an interesting idea” to “this exists in the world” is still surprisingly large.

Most people don’t want tools. They want outcomes.

Field Forge is a small experiment in collapsing that gap.

It begins with constraint rather than code.

You hold four dimensions, domain, mode, tension, and scale, and the system proposes a civic micro-app. Then you press Forge and, instead of a plan or a prompt, you get a live, shareable application.

No setup.
No deployment steps.
No technical fluency required.
Just a link.

The ideas it generates are deliberately human-scale:

booking empty rooms for solitude
matching surplus food with nearby households
mapping overlooked walking routes
connecting adjacent gardens to care homes

These are not abstract startup concepts. They are overlooked affordances, things that feel like they were already possible, waiting to be named.

Field Forge treats each idea as a micro-product.

Press Forge and it exists.

The resulting apps are minimal, templated, and constrained. They are not platforms. They are proofs of possibility, the smallest viable expression of a civic idea.

This is not about giving more people vibe coding tools.

It is an attempt to move one layer up, from systems that help people build software to systems that remove the need to build in the traditional sense at all.

In that sense, Field Forge is closer to a publishing instrument than a coding tool. It is a way to bring small, useful civic software into existence with almost no friction.