Month: March 2026

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Uncategorized

The Thing About Being a Dad Is That It’s Not About You

The Thing About Being a Dad Is That It’s Not About You

I figured this out later than I should have.

For most of my life, the scorecard was pretty simple. Am I getting better at my craft? Am I building something? Is the work moving forward? I could measure all of it. I knew where I stood.

Then I had a kid and the scorecard disappeared.

Nothing I built mattered the same way. Not because it mattered less — if anything the stakes got higher — but because the point shifted. I wasn’t the main character anymore. I’m not sure I ever was, but fatherhood makes that hard to ignore.

The shortcut I keep coming back to is this: almost everything that used to feel urgent isn’t.

The email can wait. The project will still be there. The thing you’re stressed about at 11pm has a 90% chance of being irrelevant by Thursday. Kids don’t care about your deadlines. They care about whether you showed up, whether you were actually there when you were there, whether you laughed at the thing they thought was funny even when you’d heard it four times.

That’s the whole job. Everything else is logistics.

I work in a world that rewards obsession. The more you know, the faster you move, the more you build — the better. I genuinely love that. I’m not complaining about it. But it trains you to optimize for the wrong things when you get home.

You can’t optimize fatherhood. There’s no dashboard. No conversion rate. No metric that tells you you’re doing it right.

What you have is presence or you don’t. And if you don’t, your kid notices before you do.

The irony is that becoming a dad made me better at work too. Not because I got more efficient, though that happened. But because I stopped caring about the stuff that didn’t matter, and there’s a lot of stuff at work that doesn’t matter.

When you’ve got someone at home who needs the real version of you — not the productive version, not the impressive version, just you — it recalibrates everything.

I build systems now partly because I want more time. More time for the work I actually care about, sure. But mostly more time to be somewhere else when it counts.

The shortcuts I’m most interested in these days aren’t the ones that make me more money. They’re the ones that give me more Tuesday afternoons.

That’s what I’m building toward. I’m not sure I’ve figured it out yet.

But I know what I’m building for.

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Uncategorized

I Built a Digital Version of Myself. Kind Of.

I have been drawing the same character since I was a kid.

Round head. Big dark eyes. No mouth. A little red heart on his chest.

Last week I turned him into an AI agent.

Not a chatbot. Not an avatar. A working piece of a system I have been building. He is part of the machine. The part with a face.

I spent hours trying to generate realistic videos of myself. AI kept blocking it — deepfake territory.  And it looked whack. So I stopped fighting it and went back to the drawing I had been making for 20 years.

A cartoon character that can say whatever I want. No uncanny valley. No lip sync problem. Just a glossy white figure in a data center with a glowing heart.

He is more me than the realistic version would have been.

The system that runs him is called OpenClaw. Sub-agents that write, research, generate video, and publish. Each one has a job.

This post was drafted by that system. The intro video too.

That is the shortcut. Not the tools — the system. Where building it once means it keeps working.

I came up in skateboarding and streetwear. Moved into web dev, email marketing, DTC health and wellness. The work kept getting more complex. The teams stayed small.

AI did not change what I was trying to do. It changed what was possible with one person.

The character has been in my sketchbook for two decades. He just needed the right job.

I think he found it.

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Programming

I Built an AI Camera App in a Weekend Using AI Agents

Saturday morning, coffee, phone on the table. I pointed my camera at the breakfast dishes and thought: what if AI could tell me this scene should be reimagined as a Soviet propaganda poster?

By Sunday night I had an app that does exactly that.

It’s called AIery. You point your camera at something — a kitchen, a parking lot, your dog — and the AI reads the scene and suggests a handful of absurd transformations. Things like “chairs growing faces” or “ancient ruins reclaimed by jungle.” Hold the button, it generates. That’s the whole thing.

The idea isn’t new. But I built it in a weekend. That part’s different.

Here’s what changed: I didn’t build it alone.

I spun up a team of AI agents and gave them actual job titles. Not because it was necessary — it’s not — but because something clicked differently when I treated them like people who owned something.

Wren handled debugging. Pixel owned the UI. Arch ran the backend. Reed wrote the prompts. Maven was PM — she ran a status loop every 30 minutes to check for blockers. Marcus was CMO. He wrote a Lensa-style viral playbook before I’d shipped a single line of code.

And then there was Vault. Vault is finance. On day two, Vault flagged a $0.29/month margin problem I never would have caught. Not because the amount matters at zero users — it doesn’t — but because that’s the kind of thing that quietly compounds when you’re not watching.

I didn’t name them to be cute. I named them because it changed how I interacted with them. When you ask “an AI” to review your pricing, you get a generic answer. When you ask your CFO to review your pricing, you get specificity.

The first real decision was the image model.

I tested Flux and Gemini side by side. Flux was cheaper. Flux was also, to use a precise technical term, shit. The outputs looked like someone described a dream to a toddler. Gemini’s outputs were actually compelling — the kind of thing you’d screenshot and send to someone. So I stayed with Gemini and built the pricing around it.

The second real decision was where to take payments.

Apple IAP looked convenient until I looked at the actual numbers. At 1,000 subscribers, Apple takes you to $9.09/month per user net. Web subscriptions through Stripe get you to $12.61. That’s a $3,500/month difference at a user count I haven’t hit yet. So the app routes you to a web paywall at aiery.app. It’s slightly more friction. It’s also $42,000/year in margin at scale.

But the thing I spent the most time on wasn’t the camera. It wasn’t the payments. It wasn’t the UI.

It was suggestions.ts.

That file is where the AI reads a scene and decides what to suggest. And it turns out that’s everything. “Ancient ruins” is a boring suggestion. “Chairs slowly growing human faces” hits different. The gap between those two outputs isn’t a feature — it’s a prompt. And the prompt is the actual product.

Reed and I rewrote that file more times than I rewrote anything else in the codebase. The quality of the suggestions is why someone uses the app twice instead of once. I didn’t fully understand that until I was staring at two outputs from the same scene and only one made me laugh.

There are 5 free generations. Lifetime. Not per day, not per week — 5, total. Then the paywall.

That number was deliberate. It’s enough to understand what the app does. It’s not enough to keep using it without paying. I’ve seen apps give you 30 free credits and then wonder why conversion is terrible. People use all 30, feel satisfied, and leave. Five is a taste.

Marcus wrote a 90-day launch plan before I asked for it. It included growth loops, influencer targeting, and a kill criteria section — specific metrics for when to pull the plug and stop paying for server costs.

That part I appreciated most. Most side projects don’t die — they just drift. Someone decides to keep paying $40/month “for a few more months” indefinitely, until the credit card finally expires and they feel relieved. Having a number to hit before a date makes the decision automatic.

Mine are set. I’m not going to tell you what they are, because then I’d feel accountable to the internet, and I’m not sure I want that.

AIery is live. aiery.app. Five free generations and then you decide.

I don’t know if it’ll work. I know it took a weekend. That felt worth something regardless.