FaceTime with My 19-Year-Old Self

I turned 38 this past weekend. We took our 2-year-old daughter to Children’s Fairyland in Oakland for the first time. While it has a storied history¹, from the outside it looks pretty underwhelming. But when you crouch down and see it from a 2-year-old’s perspective, the magic is right there. I wanted to try the same trick with building software, even as everyone is calling for the end of software engineering². I have a tool that can write code in any programming language, build almost any app I can imagine, and it costs almost nothing. This would literally be my 19-year-old self’s first, second, and third wishes come true. I’m building a lot, but feeling a sense of ennui about it all. Why?

I’m not trying to psychoanalyze myself³⁴. I’m trying to remember what it felt like before I learned all the reasons not to build. So I imagined FaceTiming⁵ my 19-year-old self.

19: So, are you still coding?

38: Yep!

19: Still in PHP, or Java, or C++?

38: Mostly javascript, believe it or not. And I worked primarily in python before that. But lately, “coding” mostly happens in English/natural language, and an AI called a large language model actually generates all the code: python, javascript, Swift, even shell script. You name it!

19: Wait, you have a tool that can write ANY language? Even Perl?

38: Yep!

19: Even Objective-C? I hear that’s what you have to write for this new iPhone, although I dunno why anyone would want one of those. And you’d have to use a Mac… eww..

38: Yes, and about that…

19: Wait, so are you building things all the time and having the time of your life? Man, what’s it like having to debug and maintain all of these for so many users?

38: Well, the LLMs help a lot with fixing bugs too.

19: …

38: Well, no. It’s actually taken some of the joy out of the craft…

19: YOU HAVE A MAGIC CODE WRITING TOOL and it’s not fun??? How many things have you built and released?

38: Well…

19: So it must be impossible to look for and find users right? Cuz everyone’s building things?

38: Well, a lot of people ARE building things, but you could actually say that it’s easier than ever to share what you’re working on with the right people.

19: Mmm, so what’s stopping you?

38: If EVERYONE has this magic tool and the cost of creation effectively goes to zero, how do you build something that’s differentiated? Not to mention that most things you build for yourself are likely on the roadmap of the bigger AI labs.

19: I’ve never stopped to consider that anyone could build a Facebook app. That hasn’t stopped me.

38: But what you build could be obsolete tomorrow. Not to mention that it’s harder than ever to get anyone to try your app.

19: But didn’t you just say it costs you almost nothing to build it? So why does it matter if it’s not relevant tomorrow? Or that nobody will use it?

38: No, you don’t understand. All distribution now happens through algorithmic feeds…

19: An algorithm? So something you can test and learn from?

38: No, okay. Let me start over. Every half idea that anyone has now gets built. Well, at least half built to record a half-working demo on social media.

19: Okay, forget all that. What are you actually working on?

38: I’m the only engineer at a startup called Flow Club. It’s a virtual coworking community — people join video sessions to work together and hold each other accountable.

19: Wait, you’re the ONLY engineer? Building a whole product by yourself?

38: Yeah, and honestly, I was a bit ashamed of that. We’ve raised venture funding and we had a team that we mostly had to let go of.

19: Ah.

38: I’ve never been great at managing people though, so it can be great to build. I can move across the whole stack — backend, frontend, infra, mobile — without getting stuck. I recently built this little desktop pet for it, a cartoon alligator that lives on your screen. It watches what app you’re using and reacts. Like if you’re coding, it has a little coding animation. If you’re in a flow state, it does something different. If you’re on a video call, it notices. It even knows when you’re listening to music.

19: Wait. You built a Tamagotchi. That lives on your desktop. And it knows what you’re DOING?

38: Yeah, it uses the macOS accessibility APIs to read the frontmost app, and it classifies your activity into—

19: It’s so much work to write things that work on Linux, and then figure out how to write stuff for Windows. And you can just have this AI write the code for any of those platforms?

19: So Mac, Windows, Linux, web, mobile. You can literally build anything?

38: …Yeah. I mean, the LLM wrote most of the Rust and did most of the debugging. And we used an open source app called Tauri that allows us to write typescript, which is javascript with types, and make it run natively. And an AI generated all the animations…

19: I don’t care who wrote it. You BUILT it. You had the idea and then it existed. That’s what building IS.

38: …

19: You know what your problem is? You got so worried about whether it matters that you forgot to notice that it’s amazing.

38: Well, some other things that I’ve built and thought were cool just became features that the companies that make the AIs built themselves. That’s also what everyone’s afraid of— you’re just building worse versions of what they’ll build themselves.

19: I’m building things that Facebook should have natively. If they ever get around to it, doesn’t that just prove that I was right?

38: Sure, but then you wasted time…

19: It’s not wasted time if you learned something building it

38: Well, but these AIs that generate code make it possible for you to build things without really learning or understanding much at all.

19: So does copying and pasting code. Can you just ask the AI to explain the code?

38: Well, yes…

19: Also, you never explained how we’re talking to each other.

38: Oh, so I built…

19: Gotta go. I’m gonna try to fix an issue that this woman in Canada playing my movie quotes game ran into because she’s answered all the questions I created in MySQL. And I gotta do it without AI, so this is going to take a while!

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Other Inspiration / References

• Marc Andreessen on introspection: “People who dwell in the past get stuck in the past.” The great entrepreneurs have little or zero introspection — they just build. See also his tweet: “Introspection causes emotional disorders.”
• Ian Leslie, “Against Introspection”: The best response to the Andreessen clip. Leslie argues the critics overplayed their hand (Napoleon’s emotional flamboyance isn’t self-analysis; Franklin’s self-improvement isn’t self-discovery), but so did Andreessen — introspection wasn’t invented by Freud but by Luther, and it rose hand-in-hand with capitalist entrepreneurship. “His therapist is his guitar” (on McCartney putting his inner life into work rather than analysis).
• Eileen Gu on neuroplasticity: “I get to become every day the kind of person that my 8-year-old self would revere… I think that’s the biggest flex of all time.”
• Plato, Ion: Socrates questions whether Ion’s brilliant performance of Homer is craft or divine channeling. Tried to imagine 19-year-old me applying Socratic questioning and thought about whether vibe coding is similar to being a rhapsode.
• Give Django Your Time and Money, Not Your Tokens: “There is no shortcut to understanding.” On why AI-generated open-source contributions hurt the project and the contributor.
• Plato’s Warning About AI: AI as pharmakon (simultaneously remedy and poison). The irony that Plato used writing, the technology Socrates distrusted, to preserve Socrates’ warning.
• Letters to a Young Creator: Steve Jobs Archive collection modeled on Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, featuring Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Ed Catmull, Dieter Rams, and others writing to people at the beginning of their creative journeys.
• Future You: MIT Media Lab project where you chat with an AI-generated 60-year-old version of yourself. A single session measurably reduced anxiety and increased “future self-continuity.” This piece does the inverse — talking to a past self to recapture wonder.
• Pataranutaporn et al., “Future You” (2024): The research paper behind Future You. Key finding: all four components (life story input, aged avatar, synthetic memories, conversation) had to work together — a generic chatbot alone didn’t produce the same effects.
• Relearning craft in real time by my friend Ram Bhaskar, engineering manager at Watershed

1. Children’s Fairyland was one of the earliest “themed” amusement parks in the US and likely inspired Disneyland. ↩

2. Previously, when Anthropic’s Dario Amodei said that AI would write most of the code, I thought that was merely the toolmaker hyping up the tool. But since Opus 4.5, when he says that software engineering will be fully done by AI by 2027, it feels like it’s just a matter of time. Even if many hang onto handwriting code, the amount of code generated by AI will still take over 99% of all code written. ↩

3. See What’s an Inner Child and Why Is Everyone Working on Theirs?, a TIME explainer tracing Jung’s “Divine Child” archetype through the TikTok inner child healing trend, as well as the Wikipedia Article on Inner child. ↩

4. Marc Andreessen recently said that “introspection causes emotional disorders.” In a conversation with David Senra, he remarked that the great men of history didn’t sit around examining themselves — they just built. Sam Walton didn’t wake up thinking about his internal self; he woke up and built more Walmarts. “People who dwell on the past get stuck in the past.” He’s not wrong about the dwelling part. But Ian Leslie’s response gets it right: introspection and the work ethic are historical twins, and the best builders channel their inner life into the work rather than spiraling on it. McCartney’s therapist is his guitar. ↩

5. On his latest and likely last album, J. Cole — a rap artist full of retrospection — imagines “an iPhone that travels through time” and FaceTiming his younger self. <iframe width="300" height="76" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KHpA7_c3u1Y?start=188&end=205" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" style="border-radius:8px; margin: 0.5em 0;"></iframe> “I bought a iPhone that travels through time / FaceTime, done got younger me on the line / Soon as he saw me, he just started cryin’ / I told him, ‘Relax, everything gon’ be fine’ / He wiped off his face, said he tryna be strong / But some days he feel like he doin’ it wrong” — J. Cole, “Bombs in the Ville / Hit the Gas” ↩