2 min read
A change in direction (short version)
A shorter version of “A change in direction”, cut down to read on a phone.
A week ago I started a small iOS fitness app called Ultimate Kami. It tracks the calories you eat against your weight-loss targets, and your progress in the gym. Within a week it was on the App Store.
I built about 95% of it on my iPhone, talking to Claude through Wispr Flow, often while cradling my four-week-old son to sleep. I never typed a line of code, or even looked at one.
Compare that with namagen: six years, handmade from scratch in C. My own programming language and virtual machine, multithreaded audio, an 8-op FM synth, an FDN reverb, a UI library. I’m proud of it, but people still can’t download it and use it.
Passion is a fool’s errand
Ultimate Kami wasn’t a passion project. It solved a concrete problem, and I was testing it in the real world a day or two after starting.
With namagen, I fell in love with the work more than the product. That’s the wrong way to build something people will use. Test early, fail early, and find the problem worth solving before going all in.
A change in direction
From now on, my obsession is customers, not the craft: problems valuable enough that people will pay to have them solved.
Working with agents means taking off my engineer’s hat and managing a team that works 24 hours a day. I give up some control, and English is lossy, but the trade-off is worth it.
So I’m setting myself a challenge: build many minimum viable startups. Get each off the ground in a couple of weeks, see if it has tailwind, and lean in if it does. Ultimate Kami is the first. Most will fail, and that’s fine. Around 70% of Pieter Levels’ projects made no money, and they led to the ones that did.
That doesn’t mean only small ideas. With agents running other agents, one person can now take on problems that once needed a team of tens to hundreds.
A word on namagen
I’m not shelving namagen, but it’s moving down the queue. I still want to get it to where people can download it and try it out. I’m just no longer pretending it’ll pay off my mortgage anytime soon.
