Insight

The ‘BYOD’ Choropleth | A Future Fridays experiment

Each Friday we give our team creative license to craft something with utility. One day. One thing that’s useful. This week’s experiment: The Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) Choropleth map tool. Just paste your data, pick a palette, and embed it on your site.

It’s a single-page tool that takes any US state-level dataset of survey scores, adoption rates or index values and turns it into an interactive, embeddable map.

Built for the analyst at a think tank or public affairs team who needs to explore their data before the end of the day, not the end of a sprint. (But really, anyone can use it.)

AI has unlocked a new realm of experimentation. The walls between knowledge and technology have collapsed. The time from idea to working thing has shrunk from weeks to hours. That’s genuinely exciting, but here’s the caution and learning: vibe coding only takes you so far, just look at this experiment. Functional, but lacking depth.

The interesting move is what comes after the vibe. Pairing rapid iteration with the rigour of a compact and trusted data-led product team.

It’s an operating model we informally call the holy trinity of thinker, maker and manager (more on that here). This model helps ideas move fast, bring scaffolding and craft to build upon each iteration.

In other words, if we could vibe code this in one day, what could a tiger team solve in one week? One month, a year?

Try it out