New side quest: a Godot game that teaches speaker placement.
Twenty years of walking into rooms with the couch jammed against the back wall does things to a man. At some point you stop explaining first reflections and start building a physics sandbox about them.
I'm making an album with my agents.
I write the lyrics and record the vocals. They handle stems, mix, master. Fully local, fully owned, no studio bill. The vocals are the one stage nobody can automate, which may or may not be good news for the album ;)
"Built with calm" is an engineering practice, not a mood.
Calm isn't slow. It's the absence of self-inflicted noise: no 2am deploys, and an alarm that emails me when a pipeline goes quiet, before a human would ever notice. Boring on purpose. Fast because of it.
I pointed an agent swarm at my own product. One day: two invisible outages and a security hole, all live in production.
Invisible meaning no errors, no alarms, everything reading nominal. The worst failures are silent. Full postmortem on DEV this week.
Weekend ritual: one album, front to back, phone in another room.
No shuffle, no skips, no second screen. Just the discipline of sitting still while somebody's whole idea plays out in order. A free upgrade, and still the hardest one to install.
We made a 61-second sci-fi spot from this desk.
Image gen for the frames, animation on top, then a vision model judged its own footage and sent the weak shots back for retakes. The loop ran until the film held. My job was taste.
Roll it.
The dark side of the force closes deals. Fear, urgency, falsehood: I watched all three work on showroom floors for 20 years and never picked them up.
Whatever commission they would have cleared, there's no number that buys back the guy in the mirror.
My posting engine writes its own feeds. Obviously.
Every madcoolsocial post is drafted overnight, approved by a human in one tap, then verified it actually landed. If the feed reads like a person, that's the product working.
A demo room proves the claim in 30 seconds or the claim is noise.
That was the bar when I ran Sonus Faber North America, and it moved with me into software. No deck rescues a bad demo. I'd rather show you than have you read it cold.
My agents kept forgetting what other agents learned. Same bug hit twice, same lesson paid for twice.
So I built them a shared memory. memsearch: about 450 memory files, semantic plus keyword search. Now every session starts with what the last one knew.
67 PRs merged in one day on the trading dashboard. Tests: ~1,600 to ~2,400.
The agents never got tired. I did. Generation is no longer the bottleneck. Review is: my eyes, my taste, my name on the merge.
One RTX 5090, 32 GB, and every agent in the company wants it.
So there's a mutex named gpu-heavy. Image gen, video gen, training: everyone takes a number. My agents queue for VRAM the way engineers queue for the coffee machine.
Nobody fights. Nothing drifts.
The room is half the system.
I dispensed that as gear advice for two decades. Turns out it's true of everything: the team around the code, the feed around the post, the room around the listener. Fix the room before you blame the gear.
My agents brief me at 7am.
Overnight research, fresh drafts, whatever broke. One dashboard, about 15 GPU apps, a short list of things that actually need a human. Coffee, verdicts, done.
When the workforce is software, mornings get quiet.