eric pelnik

Imagine if codex existed in 2012

Imagine if codex existed in 2005

$BIRD is selling its brand and footwear assets renaming itself NewBird AI and using a new $50M convertible facility to pivot into AI compute infrastructure by buying GPUs. Going from selling wool sneakers to chasing AI compute might be one of the wildest pivots this cycle.

RUN TIME > PHONE SCREEN TIME I thought of an interesting goal today. I would like to spend more time running than on my phone next week. I know I can do it because I am almost there already, without having explicitly targeted that goal. I've been spending less than 1 hour on my phone the last few days (and most days the last few weeks) while running 19 miles last week to start a new running habit. I'm planning to run 21 miles next week (avg. 3 per day), which is 30 minutes of running per day at a 10 minute per mile pace. That means I'd need to average less than 30 minutes per day on my phone, which I have done for full weeks at a time before, and a couple days this week. While I had never thought to compare my running time to my phone screen time before, it's not an entirely irrelevant comparison now that I think about it. I've found that running while listening to podcasts is a great way to increase my attention span, patience, and discipline, while spending too much time on my phone kills all three of those things, shortening my attention span while making me more impulsive and reactionary. You could probably tell a lot about a person just by looking at their phone screen time to running ratio. My goal next week is for mine to be sub-1.

when software had a soul there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive. the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine. software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive. the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different. nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making. somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth. A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing. now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off. and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman. now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero. which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch. when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void. this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out. here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point. AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence. the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice. if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it. that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.