Why I’m building

In 2023, I was standing in a crowded car on the Tokyo Metro, and all I was hearing was people saying “ChatGPT” and “AI.” I thought, when did Tokyo become San Francisco? Am I on BART, tripping after inhaling something?

I was at Pinecone, and ChatGPT had just come out. And a few months earlier, most engineers would say, “AI is just an autocomplete, people will still write code.” “I’ll never use AI.” Today, ask your engineer friend to write a loop by hand, and they’ll look at you like if you asked Gen Z to use a rotary phone. No one writes loops by hand. It’s a luxury now, like horseback riding.

When I moved to Anthropic, people still reviewed all the code. A year later, I would have needed a clone to review all the code my agents wrote. I built a framework that lets people deploy apps internally. Many people used the framework to share session outputs visually. That evolved into Claude Code artifacts. The visual representation of a session helped engineers keep pace with their agents and collaborate better.

Agent use pushes productivity, but I get constantly burned out by relentless walls of AI-generated text. For AI it’s simple, but to me it feels like an AI slap. They all want to send me walls of text — my agents, my colleague’s agents, even my agent’s agents. The bottleneck is my ability to digest a firehose of words.

I don’t believe a chat interface is the final evolution of human-computer interaction. There’s room for experimentation. Granted, there are some people, myself included, who like the retro vibe of working in the terminal. It mirrors those who still love vinyls, we still enjoy the funk of the ’70s (yes, manifesting).

Google Docs or Confluence, as they are today, are also a bit of a retro. They reenact typewriter pages (so useful at X, where Elon can ask you to print out a pull request).

And I really like Canva and Figma. Before AI, Canva had all the templates, but agents are getting so much better, and they’ve already been trained on all the templates in the world. And remember that moment when Claude released Claude Design and Figma stock dropped? Do you think Figma and Canva are also becoming retro?

Vibe is the new frontier. Agent output is so large that full comprehension is a luxury, like writing loops by hand. The code is information, the document is information, the artifact is information, everything is colliding. Agents know how to shape information for humans, and that shape is not a wall of text. Maybe there’s a new paradigm in there. That’s what we want to find at spacesheep.