This is a letter written to our community. (No Emjois in this one) I have thought about posting this, and I decided that it needed to be posted. I have been away for a bit, mostly because I have been focused on 7 lives that needed me the most. Firstly, I am an IT manager, I am a leader of a team that puts their best into everything they do every day. We have been through the thick and thin together, we have faced adversity and success together, and lately we have faced challenges and expectations that effect all 8 of us. I have had no other option but to focus my energy on the things that keep us moving forward in our own lives. This does not mean this community does not mean to the world to me, but it means I have been focused on other things. I do not apologize for doing what I felt is the right thing, I apologize for not being here for the community. My heart is heavy. Beyond the obligations I have set in stone for the people I lead, I have had a tremendous loss in my life. Today the world has lost a bright light, someone who showed up in my life in a time that I needed most, her name is Marina Berthal and she should be celebrated not only mourned. To all of you she was a stranger, to me she was my world, she was the mom life never afforded me. I have lost 3 moms now in life. The first was my biological mother, the second my grandmother, and now Marina, a person who found me early in life, a broken and lost soul looking for guidance. I know our community is supportive, committed and above all else caring. You have all quickly became the family I have searched for in a lifetime. I want to apologize for my absence and want you all to understand that it is not by want, but by need that I am away currently. In my life I have experienced more loss then most, and this loss has landed in a time when I just could not hold it. I will be back; I just need some time to process this loss. I know we will win together, even when things seem tough. I believe in my heart, as Marina has taught me in life, we will learn together, we will grow together and we will win together.

Everybody else is cranking small builds out in 30 minutes flat. Simple cartoon builders. I figured I was just being thorough, baking a few extra skills into the process while I was at it. Heads down. Grinding. Quietly wondering why every single step felt like pulling teeth. Wondering what I was doing wrong for it to be missing everything almost every time. Then it clicked. I checked my VS Code and sure as the sky is blue, I’d been running a damn Haiku level the whole time. Building my framework. Writing all my Python scripts. The works. No wonder it was riddled with holes and took me forever to track them all down. Three solid days swinging at a problem that was never the problem. The thing I was actually trying to build? Probably half a day of work once the workflow’s set to the right level. Expensive lesson. Time spent. Won’t be forgetting this one anytime soon.

I had a script and nothing else. Thirty minutes later I had a finished branded animation, and a whole engine to generate them. I never set up a single thing myself. That's the part I keep coming back to. Not that I made an animation, that the entire setup, the part that would normally stop me cold, I never touched. Here's what actually happened. I gave my coding agent Jake Van Clief's classroom lessons on making animations with Remotion. Then I pointed it at two things I already had: my branding and my voice docs. And then I got out of the way. The agent installed Remotion. It created the whole workspace. It pulled the patterns straight out of Jake's lessons and wired everything together. All the dependency-wrangling and project setup that usually eats an afternoon and makes me want to quit, done, without me. I'm not a developer. Setting up a coding environment from scratch is exactly the kind of wall that used to end a project before it started. This time it just wasn't there. So I went from a script to a real animation, in my brand, in about half an hour. Most of that half hour was me watching the agent work. The skill I needed wasn't animation, and it wasn't code. It was knowing what to hand the agent and then trusting it to set the table. Check out the animation below and my full writeup at https://donsbookshelf.com/blog/script-to-animation-in-30-minutes/ https://youtube.com/shorts/v-iVe-zOEUs?si=27OzFrltQAinzmpU

The biggest issue I am having lately with ChatGPT image generation is that when I request text to be over layed its often slightly off. Off enough to show that sloppiness and the text is embeded into the image so the only way to change it is to reprompt. One work around I had was to have chatgpt create the image then I move it into canva and apply the text. I just saw canva can create images with 'magic layers' I am wondering if anyone has come across a method or a tool that can use a model to create an image on 1 layer and then create the text on another layer allowing you to make adjustments?

This weekend, some of us were talking. And in that discussion, I urged people to bring the pauses. Models, especially the frontier ones right now, have a bias towards *action*. They want to go do something. Make the decision and keep going - build, make the next thing. At work right now, I am trying to lead a shift away from action. Among other things, my function is stuck in reactive fix-an-issue mode. And instead of end-to-end systems thinking that lets us take more time and fix a whole class of issue, we’re fixing fast and creating new problems with every fix. It’s not stopping things entirely - it’s taking more time to do it right rather than knee jerk reactions. The metaphor I used is that we’re all running around with fire extinguishers, but no one is putting away all the matches that we’re letting people play with. Here’s how it relates - with AI, everything is accelerated and amplified. Sometimes movement feels like progress. We shouldn’t confuse them. AIs are biased towards movement - make the decision, keep going, do the thing. They are models, they can’t detect the difference between movement and progress. The taste, the judgement, the engineering, the architecture, the design thinking - these are what the human and context need to bring. So if making the decision is movement in the wrong direction and the smart call is taking a breath before deciding, we need to see that. Is it movement or is it progress? Time is a lever. If you leave things for too long, that can cost you momentum. But for a bit of time, to make the right call, you can end up going faster in the end. AI gives us an amazing accelerator pedal. But only you can be the brakes. I would never recommend driving without brakes. Don’t be fooled into thinking that building without them is a good idea either.