The most creative thing I built this quater was completely, gloriously useless.
The other week I made a Chrome extension whose entire job is to delete the word "AI" from the internet and replace it with a cat. And then, because apparently one pointless thing wasn't enough, I made a second thing where you blow your own mind with your hands and a pile of "AI" sounds explode out of your webcam.
Neither of these solves a problem. Neither is on a roadmap. Nobody asked. There is no deck.
And honestly? That's the whole point.
Because somewhere between sitting in another conference room and watching the eighty-seventh big-tech keynote webinar announce something new and "AI-powered," I forgot the thing that made me want to do this for a living: making things! Not for a portfolio. Not for a launch. Just… because I want to.
So this AI Kumon homework isn't really about two little stuff. It's about giving yourself permission to do something random, and the slightly suspicious discovery that doing random things might actually be good for you.
Random Thing #1: the cat that eats the word "AI" 🐱
You know the feeling. You open a perfectly normal article and it's:
AI this. AI-powered that. AI agents AI copilots AI AI AIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAI
…every. single. paragraph.
I love this stuff. I work in this stuff. But even I have a saturation point, and my brain was apparently wanting to build a coping mechanism in the shape of a kitten.
Kitty Cat is a Chrome extension that quietly scans whatever page you're on and swaps every "AI" (and the whole buzzword family) for "Kitty Cat." Most of the time you get a cat. But sometimes, as a treat, the page surprises you with a wildcard: a capybara, an otter, a corgi, a hamster, a bunny, an alpaca, a panda. Little chaos gremlins of cuteness hiding in your feed.
There's a cozy widget in the bottom-right corner keeping a running tally of how many AI mentions got "purred away" today.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/noojgomafpjclklnnddampcapapknnie?utm_source=item-share-cb
The process
Wrangled a little squad of animal characters: thick-outlined, sticker-energy, very Pusheen-on-a-Notion-page.
Built a cute welcome page for the install moment, because first impressions are where the kawaii voice lives loudest.
Stored the counter locally, per-device, no sign-in, no tracking. The cat keeps your secrets.
Chrome-only for v1. Done is better than perfect, and a cat is better than AI.
Random Thing #2: the mind-blown explosion machine 🤯💥
This one is dumber and I love it more.
Picture a webcam feed that looks like early-2000s surveillance footage: grayscale, thin bounding boxes tracking your hands, fake telemetry ticking in the corners ("GESTURE STATE: IDLE", confidence %, a version number I made up). Very serious. Very the computer is scientifically BIG BROTHERING YOU.
Then you do the gesture. Both hands near your head, and then, boom, you fling them outward like your brain just left your body. And the machine loses its entire mind. A barrage of chopped-up "AI" meme sounds fires at randomized pitches and timings, the word "AI" detonates across the screen, the whole thing goes feral for half a second, then snaps back to its calm little surveillance face like nothing happened.
The clinical visual plus the unhinged audio: that mismatch IS the joke.
And here's the part that ties back to random: it's never the same explosion twice. Every trigger pulls a different handful of clips, at different pitches, panned to different spots. Controlled chaos. You can't predict it, which is exactly why it's still funny on the 40th try.
https://mindblow-ai.vercel.app/
The process
Found a meme audio clip, yanked the audio out with ffmpeg, chopped it into 9 little "AI" hits: snappy ones, punchy loud ones, one dramatic long one.
Encoded them so they live inside the file (no loading, instant chaos).
Wired up browser hand-tracking so only the full two-handed "mind blown" move triggers anything. Wave normally and it just watches you, unbothered.
Pre-loaded everything so the gap between gesture and explosion is basically zero. Lag would kill the joke.
No install. Open a page, give it your camera, blow your own mind. That's the app.
"Cool. So you wasted a weekend." from my inner adult, probably
Here's where it gets annoyingly wholesome.
I went looking for a way to justify the time I spent making a cat eat the word "AI," fully expecting nothing. Instead I found science, and now I'm insufferable about it.
Exhibit A: the cat was secretly a productivity tool. Researchers in Japan ran a study literally called "The Power of Kawaii," and viewing cute images of baby animals improved people's performance on tasks requiring carefulness and narrowed their attentional focus. Performance on a fine motor task improved about 44% after viewing puppies and kittens, versus about 12% after less-cute adult animals, and crucially, looking at pleasant food images did nothing. So it's the cuteness, not just good vibes. In a deeply stupid, accidental way, swapping your AI-stress for a tiny capybara might be making you sharper. I built a focus app. By mistake. Out of spite.
Exhibit B: the "useless" part is the medicine. A study out of Drexel had adults just… make art for 45 minutes, with no directions and any materials they wanted, markers and clay and collage. 75% of participants had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol afterward, and there was no correlation between past art experience and the drop. The thing that helped was the making, not the being-good-at-it. People described it as relaxing, freeing from constraints, and losing themselves in the work.
Which is basically the definition of flow, the state Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi built a whole career (and a famous book) around, where you get so absorbed that time goes weird and the noise in your head shuts up. You don't reach flow by optimizing your productivity stack. You reach it by getting lost in something pointless enough that your brain forgets to be anxious.
And play researcher Brian Sutton-Smith put it even more bluntly: "The opposite of play is not work, it is depression." Oof. Ok. Noted.
So the moral, allegedly, is: doing random sh*t isn't a detour from the work. It might be the maintenance the work runs on.
Letting the Lazy Kid Back Out
We grow up and we get responsible with our creativity. Every idea has to ladder up to something. Every weekend project has to be "worth it." And slowly the weird, curious, slightly-irresponsible kid who downloaded Photoshop 5.0 just to mess around gets… quiet.
These two things were me letting that kid back out. No deliverable. No KPI. Just a cat and an explosion and the small radical act of making something for no reason.
As Bob Ross, patron saint of low-stakes creativity, would say: there are no mistakes, only happy little accidents. The cat was a happy accident. The explosion machine was a happy accident. This whole "I'm-a-designer-who-makes-dumb-toys-now" era might be the happiest accident of all.
So this is your permission slip. Go make the useless thing. Your cortisol will thank you later. I mean token flex is going to be whole different story lol.
Stay tuned for the next Kumon assignment. Adios!
Tools used: vanilla HTML / CSS / JS, Claude Code, ffmpeg, browser hand-tracking, and an unreasonable amount of affection for kawaii animals.
📚 Reference
Nittono, Fukushima, Yano & Moriya (2012). The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus. PLoS ONE 7(9): e46362. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0046362
Kaimal, Ray & Muniz (2016). Reduction of Cortisol Levels and Participants' Responses Following Art Making. Art Therapy, 33(2), 74-80. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07421656.2016.1166832
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/flow-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi
Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The Ambiguity of Play. Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674005815
A Cat, an Explosion, and the Art of Doing Random Sh*t