On The Grand Adventure

Some of my favourite YouTube channels are chateau renovations and sailing. I was an early subscriber to Sailing La Vagabonde and enjoy Wild Wonderful Off-Grid and How To Renovate A Chateau. What I love about these channels is they tell the story of people taking risks and going after the life they want to live. Life, when you get off the couch, is filled with adventure. These people have said yes to the risk and done the work required to live their dreams and to figure things out as they go. And they have been rewarded for it, both in experience and financially.

The last two years or so for me have been a period of significant reflection. I have been holding onto a dream since high school and as the seasons of life have shifted I have asked "Is this the time?" For most of that period, the answer is has been, "Not just yet." I'm 39 now, so it's been over 20 years of preparation so far. I've needed education. I've needed maturity. I've needed to gather resources. I wasn't ready and the world around me wasn't ready either.

About 18 months ago, agentic programming went mainstream. AI has existed for a long time, but up until recently it was mostly a glorified chatbot. You could use it for programming, but it involved a ton of copy and paste. It was best relegated to the role of providing a better search experience. LLMs have now reached the point where they are excellent programmers. Agent harnesses, the software surrounding a model that allows it to read and write code, have developed to the point where you're at a significant disadvantage if you're typing every line of code yourself. You're simply too slow relative to your competitors who are using agentic tools.

This speed of creating software has shifted everything for me. In grad school, I studied the ways people use computer tools to make things, to be creative, and to solve problems. Specifically, I studied how people use tools to create alternative solutions and the role history plays in the creative process. These two activities are fundamental to how we make sense of the world and how we solve problems. Unfortunately, most software has very poor support for these needs and force us to use workarounds. Since working on these problems, I've wanted to make tools that properly support history and alternatives. To do so, however, requires rethinking nearly every tool in the modern productivity and creativity suite. It's a massive job. Without significant investment funding, it would be impossible. The team you'd need would be enormous and it would take years.

With the introduction of agentic programming, this calculus changed. For a few hundred dollars a month, I'm able to write far more code than before. A single experienced developer can now do the work of a small team. Reconsidering the current state of tools is no longer completely insane. It's tractable. And industries the world over are now in a massive state of flux as people grapple with how to integrate AI into their businesses. People are now open to new tools and new workflows in ways they haven't been in the past. The table has been swept. The game is reset.

This is my moment. This is my time. It doesn't get any better than this. It's now tractable to build the tools that I have in my mind. The market is open to new solutions.

It's time to go own my own grand adventure.

At the start of the year, I left a secure role where I was respected and aside from a little bit of alignment work, I could pretty much do whatever I wanted as a leader. In one course of life, it's a dream job and I'd be a lifer. In this one, however, a greater call to adventure rests in my heart.

I have decided to bring Loam out of the shadows and go for it. Loam Studios will be helping people integrate AI into their businesses and it will be building a suite of productivity and creativity tools for the age of AI. We're at the dawn of a new era.

We'll be consulting with people to ensure we're saturated in people's real problems. We want to understand them. We want to have written the glue code. We want to have wrestled with configurations. We want to understand the problems that still need solving now that AI is broadly useful.

And then we will build the tools to introduce the world to a new way of working. It's time Microsoft, Google, and Apple received some real competition.

And we're going to do it differently. I have lots to say about Big Tech that I will save for another time, but what's important for today is that Loam will be taking a different approach to growth, to how it operates, and how it solves problems for humanity. Our work will be defined by Love, Freedom, Play, Excellence, Abundance, Beauty, and Rest. We will Steward, Innovate, and Cultivate.

I invite you to follow me on this grand adventure. It's time to take the risk and see what will happen!