CTRL+SHIFT

Big things in the west end of Toronto

If you're an artist, designer, creative dev, or founder in Toronto, Vol. 10 is for you. March 27 · tendril.studio Talks + connections+ the best room in the city. RSVP → luma.com/jfjmgxot

@saleh_digital 🙌♥️ real recognize

toronto just do it better mans got the midas touch

@MihaiVentures @newsystems_ lets chat! cooking up a few things that could be interesting hello@ctrlshift.community

@ctrlshift_ai @newsystems_ cant lie you clear. super interested. collab?

Big things in the west end of Toronto

@vilakshankhanna @newsystems_ @555studio_ hell ya, 555 looks super sweet too - MTL is 🔝

@ctrlshift_ai @newsystems_ love the branding and how the website communicates vp, success, and community metrics. taking inspiration for @555studio_ we can do better on our comms

Striking image from the new Anthropic labor market impact report.

Vol. 9 on Friday may have been one of the best yet! Toronto’s creative tech scene is growing Emily Switzer laid out philosophical frameworks for craft and taste. Justin chatted aggregators vs generators + open vs closed source in gen-media. We closed with J Lee's Invalid Symbols screenings that had the room fully locked in. Shoutout to @newsystems_ for venue + programming support. Vol. 10 soon. We’re planning something special.

@sa_al_aire @josh_maldonado @hungrydumpling_ So cool! loved this recap 🙏

CTRL SHIFT Vol. 9 felt like creative × AI in real time. “AI doesn’t replace artists — it turns the user into the art director.” Manual work may shrink, but orchestration becomes power. Interesting time to build. 🚀 Big shoutout to @ctrlshift_ai @josh_maldonado @hungrydumpling_

Toronto creative tech scene is alive & well @ctrlshift_ai @josh_maldonado @newsystems_

For Vol. 9, we’re featuring an interactive canvas × projection piece by LTS Collective - a collective presentation with individual artists featured across the installation See you this Friday at @newsystems_ !

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes. As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now. It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

@joinairess 🫶 hope to see y'all there

this is super exciting! discount code for @joinairess folks: CSXAIRESS

new is becoming the heartbeat of toronto’s builder community - @joinairess - @makersloungeto - @ctrlshift_ai all in one week!

If it feels like the creative tools are changing faster than you can keep up, come to CTRL+SHIFT Vol. 9. We’re running it back at @newsystems_ for a night on generative storytelling and creative workflows that scale, with interactive talks, real networking time, and an art installation running throughout. If you’ve been building, experimenting, or just trying to keep up with what’s changing, this one’s for you. luma.com/5j88d0vo

Despite the weather we are starting our NovaForge AI Venture Lab Inc. event series strong with full house at our first event of the year.

Weather warning last night and the builders still showed up! Takeaways from the night: build in public to learn faster, compress your story into one sentence, and treat GenAI like a craft not a shortcut.

Does the idea of AI creators make you uncomfortable? Most of what we read as “authentic” is structure, timing, and coherence. As the models get better, the illusion will get harder to notice.