Thai content creator Marisa Chentakul’s technical experiments often sound whimsical at first: a vintage photo booth experience, a tiny hand-doodled desktop pet that helps complete small tasks, a cyberdeck inspired by makeup compacts and retro gadgets. But there’s a reason why people respond to her work. However tech-forward her projects are, they’re also delightfully human.

Known online as @meshtimes, Chentakul has built an audience of close to a million across social platforms by sharing the messy, charming process behind her playful AI–assisted builds.

One of her most viral projects was Little Calendars, a digital advent calendar that lets people create a surprise for each day – a photo, a playlist, a message, a gift card, an inside joke – then send the whole calendar to someone they love. Like the physical version, future dates stay locked. No skipping ahead. No peeking. Just one small moment of delight at a time.

Launched during the holiday season, more than 1 million cards were generated that December. One person messaged her to say they used the calendar for a friend battling cancer. “Now she has something to look forward to every day during her chemotherapy,” Chentakul remembers the message saying. “That really keeps pushing me to build stuff like this.”

Chentakul grew up in Thailand watching her mother run a small fashion label. As a child, she painted, sewed and made things with her hands. And she imagined following the same creative path as an adult.

But while studying fashion and fine art in San Francisco, a spine injury forced her to rethink the physically demanding future she had pictured. Fashion and textile work often meant bending, lifting, carrying and hours of hands-on labour – difficult to sustain in her condition.

“It was heartbreaking,” she says. “But what it taught me was I have to be less attached to the medium and find other ways to keep creating.”

That lesson became the through-line of her work. Fabric could become software. A doodle could become an interface. A music box could become a voice note. An advent calendar could become a website. The dream did not disappear. It merely changed form.

“Now I just call myself a builder or a creative technologist, since I can do building, coding and design,” she says. “But my goal is always the same: to create something that sparks curiosity.”

Many of Chentakul’s ideas begin with distance.

She moved to the US alone as a teenager, while her family and friends remained in Thailand. She knows what it feels like to miss birthdays, holidays and everyday moments with people you love. So her digital gifts became ways to help people send attention, care and presence through a screen.

For Valentine’s Day, she built a voice note player inspired by old hand-cranked music boxes, used to send recorded messages, photos and memories. To listen, the recipient has to keep winding a virtual control. If they stop winding, the audio stops too.

By making the listener actively wind the control, she wanted to create a moment of intentional listening. “My hope was that people would spend even a few more seconds giving someone’s voice their full attention.”

While Chentakul has no shortage of ideas, her lack of a formal coding background means she has a lot of learning to do when it comes to her new medium. That’s when she turns to AI.

“I have a very strict rule for myself that when it comes to finding inspiration: none of my web apps' inspiration comes from AI,” she says. “I want my ideas to come from the real world, because that's something AI can't experience for me. I think originality starts with where you look.“

Instead, she uses AI as a creative collaborator that helps her code in English. Tools like Claude help her plan, write, troubleshoot and understand enough to keep moving.

“AI really lowers the barrier between having an idea and seeing it come to life,” she says. “The hard part is no longer, ‘How do I build this?’ or ‘Can I build this?’ The question now is more, ‘Why should I build this?’ or ‘Why does it matter?’”

In her YouTube tutorials, Chentakul shows the sketches, the prototypes, the prompts, the trial and error. Her audience includes designers and engineers, but also parents, teachers and people who have never opened a design tool or written a line of code.

Chentakul’s hope is that they come away with a simple but powerful idea: maybe I can make something too.

Want to make something of your own? Start small, stay curious and borrow a few moves from Chentakul’s AI–assisted process.

Start with the feeling, not the tool. Before opening an AI app, ask what you want someone to feel. Chentakul’s voice note player started with the intentional ritual of winding a music box. Her advent calendar started with the joy of opening one small surprise each day. The tool came later.

Ask AI to teach you at your level. When Chentakul was learning about hardware, one helpful prompt was: “I’ve never built electronics before. Explain this like you’re teaching a product designer.” You can also try: “Walk me through this one step at a time. Wait until I finish each step before giving me the next one.”

Build the smallest version first. Chentakul’s sticky-note advice for anyone starting to vibe code: “Build tiny things. Curiosity scales faster than confidence!” Try asking Claude: “Help me build the smallest possible version of this idea today.”

Keep the context. Treat AI like a collaborator. Instead of asking Claude to start from scratch, give it your existing codebase or project details. Try: “Here’s my existing codebase. Help me add this feature without changing the current behaviour.”

Make it feel like you. Use Procreate on iPad to add handmade touches: icons, characters, textures, handwritten notes or small interface sketches. Chentakul uses the 6B Pencil for rough concepts and storyboards, Technical Pen for cleaner diagrams, QuickShape for simple UI elements, Layers to separate sketches and annotations and ColorDrop for quick mockups.