From Breadboard to AI: How Prototyping Went From Months to Minutes

The breadboard years

I started building things in electronics, back when building meant earning every step.

An idea began with a parts list. You purchased components, often waiting weeks for them to arrive. You sat with the datasheet of a 7447 decoder, working out pin by pin how it would drive a seven-segment display. You tested a whole batch of 555 timers because not every chip behaved the way the paper promised. Then came the breadboard, a forest of jumper wires where the idea first flickered into life, usually after hours of chasing a loose connection. My fellow Fellenberg friends know exactly what I'm talking about.

And that was only the prototype. To make it real you designed the circuit board, etched it in chemicals, drilled it, mounted and soldered every component by hand. From idea to working device could take months. Every mistake cost you time, money, and occasionally a perfectly good chip.

I loved it. But I also remember how much of that love was patience.

The inside of a build. Hand-etched board, mains transformer, every wire routed and soldered by hand. Months of work, and I loved every hour of it.

Hand-made case, parallel port, rocker switch salvaged from the parts drawer. If you know what LPT1 means, we are probably the same age.

The first taste of god mode

Then came the Arduino, and not long after, the Raspberry Pi. Everything changed.

Suddenly I could imagine something, plan it, code it, and there it was, running, often doing more than I had dared to ask of it. No etching tank. No waiting for parts to do the work a few lines of code could now handle. The distance between idea and reality collapsed from months to days.

It felt like god mode. The constraint was no longer the workshop. It was my imagination.

The same thing happened with enclosures. There was a time when a case for a device meant designing it, prototyping it, then manufacturing it by hand in my workshop. Then 3D printing arrived. I still do the designing, that part of the craft never left, but now I press print and a few hours later the thing exists, exactly as I drew it. Well, maybe not always exactly. But hey, I can adjust and reprint.

From Breadboard to AI

I feel that same shift happening again right now, with Claude and Lovable.

My dreams of building products no longer need months just to reach a first test. I can take an idea, shape it into a PRD, work through the design, and have a working prototype in front of me within minutes. Not a sketch. Not a slide. A real thing I can click, break, and improve.

The pattern is identical to the one I lived through with the Arduino and the 3D printer. A power tool arrives, the gap between imagination and reality shrinks, and the people who embrace it early get to spend their energy on the part that actually matters: the idea, and whether it is worth building at all.

A message for all

The tools have never been this powerful, and they have never been this accessible. You do not need a lab, a workshop, or a team. You need curiosity and the willingness to learn the tool in front of you.

So embrace technology. Use it. Work it. It exists to make us more efficient and to let us build the things we have carried around in our heads for years.

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, the latest thing to come out of my own workshop is ikigai.reubenchircop.com, a free reflection tool I built with exactly the tools described above. No breadboard required. From idea to live product in a fraction of the time any previous era would have allowed.

The datasheets taught me patience. The Arduino taught me speed. AI is teaching me that the only real bottleneck left is the quality of my ideas.

God mode is still on.

This post is part of an ongoing series of reflections on building, technology, and doing work that fits.