There is a clear backlash against software written by AI, from developers and consumers alike. The reality, however, is that most, if not all, software will be partly written by AI. It’s inevitable, and it would even be irresponsible not to use it. The problem isn’t using AI; it’s the laziness of shipping a product without thinking through and owning its decisions, denying users the care and craftsmanship they deserve.
I just completed a massive software port in 5 days, for less than $200 in AI costs, using 3+ coding agents (Codex Sol 6.1 High). A project I had previously dismissed because it would have required months of work from a small team of experienced engineers. I've been using AI in my development work since the tools first became available, but this was my first experience running a well-defined, multi-agent task over such a long period (context window, caching and model efficiency weren't making that realistic to me until recently). Most of my AI coding tasks take minutes to a couple of hours. I…
The cost of knowledge is approaching zero. The cost of building software is approaching zero. And since almost everything runs on software, this changes... well, everything. If you're running a company, investing in one, or building one from scratch, the implications are massive and we haven't fully internalized them yet. Here are some of the things I don't hear people talk too much about. The 10x Myth (and the 10x Opportunity) Here's what I think most people get wrong.
I still remember meeting Steve Duda in the early days of Splice. We immediately connected over shared values – supporting music producers, doing what's "right," and pursuing excellence above all else. Those conversations led to Serum becoming the first-ever virtual instrument offered through our Rent-to-Own model, making this powerful tool accessible to musicians who couldn't afford the upfront cost. Today, I'm proud to see Serum 2 released to the world after five years of meticulous development. This isn't just another update – it's a complete evolution that maintains the soul of the…
You never forget your first hack. For me, it was watching my cousin work his magic on Atari ST games during a childhood vacation. The way he could patch game resources to modify their behavior seemed like pure wizardry to my young mind. That spark of curiosity led me down a fascinating path – from tinkering with cracked software on an Amstrad 1512 to diving deep into DRM systems and eventually reverse engineering virtualized audio gear.
Throughout my career, I've worked with a broad range of programming languages, dabbling in everything from the widely used to the obscure (shoutout to those still coding in Perl). These days, my main tools of the trade are modern C++ and Python. Honestly, C++ and Python aren't my favorite languages. I do respect C++ for its power and versatility. Even with its complexity and the initial absence of solid guidelines and a comprehensive standard library, I've grown to appreciate its evolution. Today, surprisingly, C++ is my go-to language, especially given my field of work.
For a little while, I’ve been considering the potential impact of generative Artificial Intelligence on various areas of our lives, more recently I’ve had very interesting conversations about applying AI to help the creations of manga/animé. This blurb was writing to help think through the challenges, but why not posting them. Having witnessed the transition from analog to digital, and from local to cloud computing, I see generative AI as yet another significant shift.
The collaboration problem: overwriting each other changes In traditional online applications, when you make a modification to the state of the object you work on, the change propagates to a central server that holds the “truth”. The server registers the change and sends back a confirmation that the change was indeed applied. The problem happens when Alice and Bob try to update the same database field at the same time. At this point, there will be a data race and whichever request gets to the database last, will “win”, the other will be discarded. That’s quite a jarring experience especially…
Last time I used Windows on my main development machine was sometime in the early 2000s. Over the years, I had several side Windows machines (usually because I needed Visual Studio) but I was never really serious about using a PC as my main dev machine. Things have changed a lot in almost 20 years, and especially recently. Apple is moving to ARM and to everybody’s shock the Windows team has been investing in letting us run Linux distributions “natively” for a few years now!
We’re approaching the first anniversary of when I stepped down from my operating role at Splice. The company kept on growing rapidly and be impactful, I am very proud of what the team is doing to change things from within the music industry. I had a blast during my time off: I worked on a great project with Grimes which we started previewing but had to put on hold because of covid-19. I had the privilege to listened to, coach and mentor talented startup leaders. I hacked on so many research projects and learned a ton. Due to the lockdown, I became an unqualified homeschool teacher and was…
This week, Chang Xu and I are running our very first Braintrust LA event. While the event is private and we won’t talk about who’s presenting and who’s attending, I wanted to share with you a note we wrote to the attendees. The idea of organizing Braintrust LA came to us when we discussed what we could do to help the LA ecosystem. Between the two of us, Chang as a VC and Matt as a founder, we wanted to find a selfless way to support entrepreneurs beyond introducing them to our networks or helping them with their decks. We opted to follow an early Pixar key mechanism: the Braintrust. The…
Security, Privacy and Trust will be major themes in 2020. Looking at this arm report, 30% of surveyed folks were more concerned in 2019 over data privacy and security than they were in 2018. Add the elections, legal actions against Google & Facebook, Apple and others pushing for less tracking and safer data and we are going to see a huge need to push compute power to the edge (on device).
Chances are you should instead be investing in data engineering so you can take a deep look at your properly labeled and processed data instead of throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars in Machine Learning (ML). ML isn’t magical, you need a lot of clean, labeled data. Then you need a specific use case to design and deploy a great model that can help your product. Most startups don’t have clean, reliable and labeled data that can be used to train models. That’s why you need data engineers.
Looking back at the last 10 years, two specific trends are very clear to me, here they are highlighted by Fred Wilson: “The massive experiment in using capital as a moat to build startups into sustainable businesses has now played out and we can call it a failure for the most part.” “The big four tech companies own monopolies or duopolies in their core markets and are using the power of those market positions to extend their reach into tangential markets and beyond.”
In a lot of ways, I owe my professional career to music. If it wasn’t for music, I wouldn’t have learned about samplers, sequencers, MIDI and the crazy world of synthesizers. Those machines led me to computers and computer music which led me to both sound engineering and reverse engineering (RE). RE led me to a social community of hackers with strong values caring about education and musicians. They gave me a chance to learn a lot about audio software and eventually software engineering. When I saw that both the music and the web industries were changing so rapidly, I switched industry and…
In the previous article, I explained what data we needed to generate waveforms and showed how to use a BBC Free Open Source Software to generate that data. In this article, I will show how to draw a waveform using Google’s Flutter UI toolkit for mobile, desktop and web. Here is the end result will are going for: You can play with the web version of the UI here, thanks to Flutter web!
Audio visualization is a fascinating topic. We often take it for granted, but sound isn’t visible and only exists over time. In the case of a video stream, you can pick a frame/image and you have a snapshot of the video at this specific time. But you can’t do that with sound. Sound is the oscillation/vibration of molecules over time, it’s by definition a sensation and therefore not something easily visualized. In this article, I will cover the most common representation of an audio file: the waveform.
Here’s a very opinionated tour of some of the various technologies available to individuals and companies. This is far from a complete list and the comments are based on my personal opinions which might not match your expectations, values or even experience. This first part will focus on programming languages. Programming languages Safe bets and my preferred languages Go https://golang.org Free and open source, from Google. Go has been my goto language for many years now, it’s a great server and system programming language that shines for its simplicity and performance. It works best when…
Originally posted on Medium Impactful innovation is what Research & Development (R&D) teams around the world are working hard towards. Yet, there don’t seem to be blueprints that are reused and trusted across companies. On one hand, we get very little visibility into this process and on the other, it seems very challenging to define and measure success. I love challenges, the harder the better. And the R&D challenge while also building sustainable businesses or growth is something I’ve been thinking a lot about for a while. So here are my thoughts and some of the things I’m experimenting with…
I’ve now been the co-founder and CTO of Splice for almost 6 years. It’s officially the longest place I ever worked at. It’s funny because it does feel like we just started yesterday. I decided to write down some unedited thoughts and share them here. I remembered thinking that I’d love to know what it was really like to be a founder, but that’s not something I could find on the internet. Hopefully a future entrepreneur will find this post and will get a glimpse at what it is like for me. (sorry for the raw/unedited version, but I felt the post would otherwise stay in my draft folder forever)
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