FaceTime with My 19-Year-Old Self

I turned 38 last week. We took our 2-year-old daughter to Children’s Fairyland in Oakland for the first time. From the outside it looks underwhelming¹, but if you crouch down to a 2-year-old’s height and see it through their eyes, the magic is there. I wanted to try the same trick with how I build software. Lately, despite writing more code than ever with LLMs, I’ve started feeling a sense of creeping ennui². But I have a tool that can write code in any language, build almost any app I can imagine, and it costs a fraction of what a human engineer would. To my 19-year-old self stumbling to deploy dynamic websites with PHP and inline SQL, this would have been wishes one, two, and three. Why am I not building all the great things?

This isn’t your usual inner child work³, though it is a form of introspection⁴. I’m trying to remember what it felt like before I learned all the reasons not to build, and to think about how I might use AI to not just write code but deepen my understanding. So I imagined FaceTiming my 19-year-old self⁵.

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! You just describe the requirements in English and it generates all the code. You don’t even need to be technical.

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 tons of apps and sites for so many users?

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

19: That sounds like a blast. So you never get stuck on anything?

38: AI can help you work around things, although it does lead you down the wrong path too. But you’re right— you don’t get stuck the same way. The speed of progress can be addicting⁶, but it’s actually taken some of the joy out of the craft. Remember how great it feels to get stuck on something and then finally figure it out?

19: True. BUT YOU HAVE A MAGIC CODE WRITING TOOL and it’s not fun??? How many things have you built and released? Is EVERYONE now an engineer just constantly building and releasing things?

38: Well, I have many half-built features and projects laying around…

19: Is deploying stuff really hard? Or is it impossible to look for and find users? Cuz everyone’s building things?

38: The AIs and platforms make deploying pretty straightforward. A lot of people ARE building things. 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?

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. And even though I said it’s easier than ever to get people to LOOK at what you’ve built, it’s hard to actually get them to really USE it.

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?

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 inkling of an idea that anyone has now gets built. The LLMs fill in the rest. Well, at least enough to record a half-working demo showing a single happy path rather than actually building what people want.

19: Okay, forget all that. What are you excited about building?

38: Well, most of my coding happens for my startup Flow Club, where I’m the only engineer. It’s a virtual coworking community — people from all over the world join thousands of video sessions every week to work together and hold each other accountable.

19: Whoa. Wait, you have your own company? And you’re the ONLY engineer? Building a whole product by yourself?

38: Yeah, and honestly, I’m 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. That sucks.

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 the community to test soon. It’s 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 for my assignments, and I can’t even figure out how to get started writing Windows desktop software. And you can just have this AI write the code for any of Mac, Windows, Linux, web, mobile. You can literally build anything?

38: …Yeah. I mean, the LLM wrote most of it in a language called Rust that I don’t know well at all, and it 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 made it exist. That’s what building IS.

38: …

19: You know what your problem is? You’re so worried about whether it’ll become big or go viral or make lots of money that you forgot to notice that just building it is amazing.

38: I had fun building a way to control the AI that writes my code from my phone⁷, but of course, the companies that make the AI built that themselves eventually. And that’s what most people are doing. Just building tools to make them or others faster at building things.

19: I’d love to build things that I get to use myself. 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. But this desktop app that I built the first version of, I haven’t the faintest idea how Tauri or the Mac system features work.

19: Could you build something using the AI that helps you understand and learn that?

38: Oh, I actually have built a few things—

19: Great! I gotta go. Gotta 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!

Thanks to Amanda Ables, Ricky Yean, and Claude for reading drafts of this.

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

2. I’ll admit that I first learned this word from Inside Out 2, but I’ve thought for a while now that this encapsulates the dissatisfaction I’ve felt from vibe coding. I think it comes from the rapid pace of change as models, harnesses, and so-called best practices have completely upended both expectations and what building looks like, as well as everyone saying software engineering will soon be dead. 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 given the current speed and acceleration. ↩

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.” While I disagree, it’s interesting to think about. ↩

5. On his latest and likely last album, J. Cole tells the story of returning to his hometown at ages 29 and 39, including this verse about “an iPhone that travels through time” and FaceTiming his younger self. “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” ↩

6. In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s model of flow, one of the seven elements is that the challenge is perfectly suited to your skills. I recently learned about the concept of “dark flow”, which is when the makers of a game of chance convince you of the illusion that your skills matter. Combined with focus, timelessness, and ecstasy, gambling can create an addictive loop. Can you achieve flow when vibe coding, or is it closer to dark flow? ↩

7. I built a way to control Claude Code from my phone, which Anthropic of course shipped natively (and yes, this is a half-working demo for a single happy path). I love Remote Control though! ↩

Inspiration / References ⓘThings I read, watched, or thought about while writing this post — or just happened to be reading at the time. Added via a /ref command in Claude Code; where I didn't write a description, Claude filled one in.

• J. Cole, "Bombs in the Ville / Hit the Gas": The main inspiration for this post: "I bought a iPhone that travels through time / FaceTime, done got younger me on the line."
• 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.
• 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.
• Ricky Yean, "My Claw-Pilled February (The Future Is Almost Here)": My co-founder Ricky wrote about his experience with Openclaw. Specifically, we've been talking a lot about "happy paths" for both human users and agents.
• Sachin, "Vibe Coding and the Maker Movement": Argues vibe coding mirrors the Maker Movement's arc but skips the gradual skill-building phase. Without that developmental period, it's hard to distinguish innovation from productivity theater.
• 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, 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).
• 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."
• Pataranutaporn et al., "Future You" (2024): The research paper for Future You
• Relearning craft in real time by Ram Bhaskar: "You end up operating in the gap between faster tools and slower mental models."
• 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.
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet: Didn't read specifically for or while writing this, but obviously thought about this when reading the Steve Jobs archive letters
• Bill Gurley, Running Down a Dream: Book I'm reading right now. Read several chapters on my Kindle when stuck on this post and this Bob Dylan quote from the book inspired me to get this post across the line when I considered shelving it: "Life isn't about finding yourself, or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself. And creating things."
• Mario Zechner, "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down": "And I would like to suggest that slowing the fuck down is the way to go. Give yourself time to think about what you're actually building and why."
• Will Manidis, "Tool Shaped Objects": Many AI tools are "tool-shaped objects" — optimized for the sensation of productivity rather than actual output. The feeling of building without the substance.