Something Is Happening
I’ve had a series of eerily similar conversations with friends over the past couple of months. They are all eerily similar: I’m told what a joy it is to build things. There’s an energy in the conversation that is palpable. Usually, the person tells me how they’re foregoing sleep, that they’re “working” around the clock, and that they go to bed looking forward to waking up and doing it all again.
My first such conversation was with Wes McKinney a few months back. He’s been documenting his machine-like output on Twitter for a while now: roborev, agentsview, msgvault, SpicyTakes, and more. A couple months ago, he was showing me roborev. His energy on the call was infectious. It didn’t really click with me at the time what he was so excited about (aside from roborev, which was indeed cool).
More recently, I had a conversation with a founder that was raving about how fun it is to work on their product. It reminded me of my call with Wes. My founder friend has been managing for years, but now AI lets them contribute meaningful changes to their core product. I was told how they’re now spending the bulk of their time building. So much so that they told me they could, “do this for the next 40 years and be totally content.”
A couple months back, another VC friend told me that they planned to leave their firm. “It’s a great time to be an operator.” In my most recent coffee with them, they had left. They asked me what I’d do if I were in their position. I told them I’d find a problem in one of they advise and just spend time with AI trying to solve it. Rinse and repeat.
Garry Tan’s recent Twitter post is yet another example. The guy is just building.
Last night, yet another friend texted me around 11 PM:
So. Here is my need
In using Claude to help me build a script
It’s a demo video, shot in a slightly cinematic way, think, Apple promo video, but maybe a bit more grounded in reality. It’s end to end my vision that I’m building
No words used. Just shots of things happening
The script has everything I want to see, how it’s supposed to be seen. Fades, colors, fonts etc
My question is, I’m not a graphics guy
Does anything exist that I could feed this with prompts etc into to create a very realistic version of this
I basically copy/pasted that into ChatGPT, shared the link with my friend, and went off to watch the latest Pitt episode with my wife.
An hour later, I had a series of messages from my friend:
Funny enough. Claude just kinda keeps going. It seems to think it’s going to build a passable version of this for me
We will see at the end what it does haha
…
Welp
Guess I’m not sleeping again tonight
…
Dude
This is incredible
Just so you can understand
I have, 6 scenes built
6 minutes of video
Like, done
I’m watching it on my Mac mini
…
I couldn’t do any of what I just did if I tried
The number of tools I would have had to use
I don’t even know how many I would need. But I know I don’t know how to use them
This is ridiculous
…
I think I’ve decided I’ll just give up sleep
Because if I sleep, I can’t build things
And that makes me sad
These conversations capture how I’ve been feeling lately, too. It’s some combination of:
- Anything is possible
- I just want to build
- This is so much fun
I started picking up on this vibe a few months ago. I started feeling it myself in the past month. Something is happening. I don’t know what it is, but it’s exciting.