AI is making it easier than ever to build solutions tailored to uniquely individual needs. Cototyping documents what people are making — and explores what it means when solutions stop being shared.
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For most of history, a solution to a problem — a tool, a technique, a workaround — was worth sharing because others probably had the same problem. Shared solutions built shared knowledge. They became craft, then profession, then institution.
AI is changing that dynamic. It's now possible to build something that solves your problem exactly — your dialect, your workflow, your specific constraints — in a matter of hours. The nurse who built a medication log for her mother in Tamil. The farmer who trained a model on his own soil. The parent who generates worksheets calibrated to one child's particular way of reading.
These solutions are remarkable. But they are also, almost by definition, not shared. They disappear with the person who made them. The knowledge they represent — about a problem, a context, a set of human needs — is never accumulated.
Cototyping is an attempt to change that. To document what people are building at the personal scale, understand the problems that prompted it, and ask what patterns emerge when you look at thousands of individual solutions together.
The most valuable submissions aren't the cleverest solutions. They're the ones that make the problem visible. Tell us yours.