The Transformation

Ever since I was a kid, I loved communing with the machine. I love to write code. I love solving problems. I love feeling clever with the machine. I love to sit down and solve a problem with mathematics and code as harmonic symphony of shit getting done jamming with a keyboard and paper diagrams in beautiful flow state. I love the grind of making something perfect in a mathematical sense. I love playing board games with my friends. Beyond my wife, these facts that I’ve shared are the core to my identity.

Early in my life, I watched a movie called SLC Punk, and I bring your attention to a specific scene that captures insight into my personality. There is this character named Mike (played by a young Jason Segel) who is a straight laced square looking fellow. The narrator points out:

Oh, this kid, though. This kid, he’s not a fuckin’ poser. He’s not a poser.

He looks like a total nerd, right?

This guy looks like a geek, but his name’s Mike.

He’s one of the most hard-core guys in the scene.

Well, watch what happens.

Mike then goes harder than anyone else in the room. Mindset is not fashion. That scene is why I started wearing polo shirts and khakis on purpose in high school. I love the movie for that moment, and I also took the ending seriously: the main character eventually realizes there is no future in pure anarchy and gets his shit together.

I am highly oppositional and disagreeable. I cannot stand anyone standing in authority over me and will challenge anyone. I bring this up because as much as I love these machines, I hate the entire tech industry. I hate the fashionable trends. I hate how terrible most software is written. The hate is pathological and deep. It’s ok to hate because it is active and pure while the real evil is indifference. I channeled all of it into forging a career. For over a decade I put the shit aside and focused on what my employers actually needed.

I had one goal: retire early.

I fucking did it because life is a game. It did not come without scars like poor health from excess weight, cultural indoctrination of status signaling, the rat race in general, and the politics of bringing your whole self to work. Some of those scars took years to undo while some are healing now. For years after I retired my ego ran hot, and I started the most dangerous project I would ever do: Adama.

Adama is the magnum opus of my career. It represents everything that I learned, and it fulfilled a role in my identity since I love programming languages. I wrestled with a lot of things while building Adama between the role of success and my desires. Should I try to raise VC money? Should I hire? The cultural “keeping up with the Jones’s” scar would have me enslave myself to some VC, and my pedigree was primed for hustling.

I both failed and protected myself from success. I threw out the rule book, and I had a festival of self indulgent coding and engineering. The project is a love letter to the ideas, and that’s truth. It is also true that I found my limit, and building a large distributed system as a solo man is a bad idea. I got surprisingly far and invented a neat platform that actually worked. I realized the vision. I also got in my own way and never found or sold a cohesive narrative for adoption.

When I tried to do the business shit, my personality stopped being an asset. I love to argue. In hiring that is a red flag for most people, and their inability to engage at the level I demand made every candidate a strong no. Worse yet, the surface area of what I built was massive. There was no clear path for anyone to contribute in a meaningful way until something caught fire in production.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a good time inventing a bunch of shit. None of it converted in any traditional sense beyond making me feel smart and clever. At the core I was wrestling with ambition, identity, and what I actually wanted. If I wanted conventional success I would have had to put on the executive hat, cut 90% of what I was doing, and radically simplify. Every time I narrowed the field to something with a compelling narrative, I lost interest. The interest faded because I had all the solutions, and all that was left was debasing myself to raise funds and hire people which are problems I don’t care about. I like building machines of metal and code, and I can’t stand the messy machines of people called corporations.

This struggle took four years. Then my house had an attic fire that changed everything. A confluence of realizations hit almost instantly. Sorting out the pivot has taken a year. The biggest realization: as much as I love tech and coding, the broader “community” is completely indifferent to me. That is the core problem of my personality. I can sit down, solve a hard problem, feel the inner tickle of delight, and then move the fuck on. Losing all your shit because the fire department tore down the fucking ceiling breaks any illusion of control, and I realized that I was never in control. This was a forced moment of seeing reality for what it is in sheer chaos. Running back into a burning building to get your wife’s cat is a moment of clarity of what is important: life.

I realized I had been acting out of alignment with my identity. My identity is sovereignty. I want to do my thing and be left the fuck alone. That is lonely inside any collaborative community. As much as part of me would enjoy a hippie commune, my standards push me to go deep and do great work. My archetype is the mountain man who disappears into the mountains because fuck everyone else. If I have to play a game, I will master it and push the team forward—and make most people around me miserable in the process. I will bear the burden of command, be the jerk that pushes standards, do so with a smile, and achieve objectives that the business rewards me for.

I hyperfocus and go hard when shit actually needs to get done. I was fortunate the world still needed talented specialists when I was playing the career game. The other side of the equation is that the ground shifted under everyone. The speed and scale of AI capability growth has astounded me. It is thesis-changing on multiple fronts. I am grateful my personality faults protected me from chasing conventional success just as the board was being flipped.

AI is humbling for what is possible, and it is an identity loss for sure. The knowledge that I have hoarded my entire life is now a commodity. The skills that I executed for that decade can be summoned via a prompt with a reasonable skill. While my particular artistry is lost, the worse-is-better camp has fully won the field and I concede to the statistical world they ushered in. For however long it lasts, creativity is like my last moat. On the bright side, AI is now the best partner to jam with and it can engage with me at a high throughput that most people can’t. Paradoxically, AI helps me be around people because my expectations of them are more reasonable.

AI will get better, but it begs the question of what is next. While I believe the future of Elon’s abundance will come, I don’t think it will come to all domains equally in good fashion and there is a failure mode in waiting for it. The future is really built by those that build it, and this isn’t a resignation from tech. It’s a scoping of the engagement rules that I have to work with as I have my own limits.

So, let’s define the rules for the future.

First, I have to avoid the trap of scalability. The practical reason is that it is nerd bait, and if I build something then I don’t want something that can scale. I don’t want customers that need support. I’ll give you a single file that just runs on a single machine. Maybe it runs on your desktop. Maybe it runs on a single server, but I’m scoped to a single machine with off-site backup for durability. Anything else, and I’ll go down the rabbit hole of distributed system masturbation. I did massive scale at a level most will never know, so I’m good.

The second rule is that I’m using Java because Java is so gaud damn punk in 2026. It’s the most gaud damn radical move against mainstream technologists that I love it now. Look, the language is ugly, but it’s faster than JavaScript and has some super powers which is why I used it for Adama. It feels done, and I don’t have to work with any community for anything. Everything I need is just there, and I’ll run that shit on bare metal to avoid any container shit. This lets me keep it simple, use the machine fully instead of some limp dick service layer that has to orchestrate a spaghetti of services. It’s just fun to build this way. The poser language of the day is Rust, and the implication of this rule is to avoid all the trendy shit. In the age of AI, I suspect Java is going to survive the longest due to how many important applications depend on it in enterprise.

The third rule is that I’m only going to build what I need. If I need something, then I’ll build it. This is relevant since I’m going through a process of shutting down a variety of experiments in flight. I’m never going to build shit for anyone else again. I’ll share my results, and I may sell some of it if it seems like a good idea. The internal strife, and why I’m writing this, is that I’m shutting down Adama. It’s beautiful technology, but it adds too much friction in the age of AI. I’ll keep the repo alive, and I will have AI harvest it for ideas.

These rules define how I will engage with my desire to build, but I’m moving out of strict software too. Software is being eaten by AI, and my newly formed pragmatism is centered around the reality of where we are. It’s just not interesting to write software with AI, and it’s hard to resist the easy button of just asking the machine to do the thing. I can solve problems using executive functioning like an agent herder, but that’s just not the same.

My primary build medium is expanding out into the real world. I am building a house on 20 acres, and I plan to raise cattle that I will slaughter and eat. As such, I’m going to automate a ranch. I’m going to learn how to build robots that can interact with 1,000 pound steers and survive. This is going to be so metal because I have to learn to weld, build an electrical system, figure out mechanics, and just mess around with extremely dangerous shit. The intensity that I can learn the science is unlimited via AI, but my ability to execute is constrained by experiments gated by having components shipped to me, so I can strive for a reasonable balance to not burn out.

There are going to be interesting puzzles to build giant fucking robots to do shit on rough acreage hauling 5,000 pounds because water is fucking heavy, so I have my work cut out for me. This is going to be hard, and it is where I assert absolute dominance over my life by taking direct control of my food since I’m a carnivore. My wife and I only eat meat, and it has healed us on so many fronts.

This is the dumbest sounding diet on the planet, but it is shocking that it works and it is the most punk lifestyle because you give a finger to big pharma, the medical profession, and plant agriculture. My goal will be only leave the house to hang out with friends and family, and that will be the good life. Fuck your bullshit culture. Fuck your bullshit food. Fuck your bullshit cities. Fuck your bullshit traffic. Fuck your bullshit circle jerking “economy”. I’ll eat meat that I used to pet, play board games, shoot guns on my land, and talk shit with my friends.