I had dinner on Wednesday night with my friend Seth, who has been building products and companies since I met him over thirty years ago. He was expounding on his newfound ability to build products and companies all by himself with AI coding tools. His enthusiasm was off the charts, and I decided to pour some cold water on it and said, "yeah but it can't do stuff in the real world yet." And he said, "Like what?" And I said, "Like grow corn."

The next morning this landed in my text messages.

As Seth writes in the story tab of that website:

SETH: “I can do anything I want with software from my terminal.”

FRED: “That's not fire. You can't like grow corn.”

SETH: “I bet you I could. You know what I mean? I'm going to grow corn for you.”

FRED: “That'd be great. Thank you.”

SETH: “I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to show you. And that'll be our first vibe coding project together.”

FRED: “It's a physical thing.”

SETH: “I will buy fucking land with an API via my terminal and I will hire some service to plant corn.”

FRED: “Okay, well that's a little different... you're going to get somebody to grow corn for you. But that's not exactly what I'm talking about. Like, you can hire Jeff to come and make dinner for you, but like you can't make dinner.”

SETH: “No, but anything that could be done with technology, I can do now. Anything, which is insane.”

So now, Seth has roped me into his project that he calls Proof of Corn, and we are collaborating in a shared GitHub repo with a goal of growing corn.

He made his point and it landed with me:

I like to listen to music on SoundCloud. For one, I am the Chairman of the Company. For another, I love the unsigned artists, remixes, and mixed tapes that make up more than half of the catalog on the service and mostly don't exist anywhere else. The more I listen on SoundCloud, the better recommendations I get for emerging artists, mixes, and remixes. It's more fun for me than the other services. But most people listen on Spotify or Apple Music. And so when I get a playlist sent to me on Spotify or Apple Music, I have to listen there.

No more.

Last year SoundCloud launched Library Sync. When new users join SoundCloud, they can sync their Spotify or Apple Music library and playlists to SoundCloud. No more cold start problem.

SoundCloud also offers this service, powered by Free Your Music, to longstanding users like me.

I got some great playlists over the holidays, like my friend Steve's annual year-end playlist, the soundtrack to Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire (which we saw last week and loved), the soundtrack to Mark Ronson's book (which I read over the holidays), and some Radiohead (we all need Radiohead). So I sync'd them this morning to my SoundCloud.

Here's what that looked like:

You scroll down to the bottom of your library on the SoundCloud mobile app and select Import:

I had dinner on Wednesday night with my friend Seth, who has been building products and companies since I met him over thirty years ago. He was expounding on his newfound ability to build products and companies all by himself with AI coding tools. His enthusiasm was off the charts, and I decided to pour some cold water on it and said, "yeah but it can't do stuff in the real world yet." And he said, "Like what?" And I said, "Like grow corn."

The next morning this landed in my text messages.

As Seth writes in the story tab of that website:

SETH: “I can do anything I want with software from my terminal.”

FRED: “That's not fire. You can't like grow corn.”

SETH: “I bet you I could. You know what I mean? I'm going to grow corn for you.”

FRED: “That'd be great. Thank you.”

SETH: “I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to show you. And that'll be our first vibe coding project together.”

FRED: “It's a physical thing.”

SETH: “I will buy fucking land with an API via my terminal and I will hire some service to plant corn.”

FRED: “Okay, well that's a little different... you're going to get somebody to grow corn for you. But that's not exactly what I'm talking about. Like, you can hire Jeff to come and make dinner for you, but like you can't make dinner.”

SETH: “No, but anything that could be done with technology, I can do now. Anything, which is insane.”

So now, Seth has roped me into his project that he calls Proof of Corn, and we are collaborating in a shared GitHub repo with a goal of growing corn.

He made his point and it landed with me:

I like to listen to music on SoundCloud. For one, I am the Chairman of the Company. For another, I love the unsigned artists, remixes, and mixed tapes that make up more than half of the catalog on the service and mostly don't exist anywhere else. The more I listen on SoundCloud, the better recommendations I get for emerging artists, mixes, and remixes. It's more fun for me than the other services. But most people listen on Spotify or Apple Music. And so when I get a playlist sent to me on Spotify or Apple Music, I have to listen there.

No more.

Last year SoundCloud launched Library Sync. When new users join SoundCloud, they can sync their Spotify or Apple Music library and playlists to SoundCloud. No more cold start problem.

SoundCloud also offers this service, powered by Free Your Music, to longstanding users like me.

I got some great playlists over the holidays, like my friend Steve's annual year-end playlist, the soundtrack to Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire (which we saw last week and loved), the soundtrack to Mark Ronson's book (which I read over the holidays), and some Radiohead (we all need Radiohead). So I sync'd them this morning to my SoundCloud.

Here's what that looked like:

You scroll down to the bottom of your library on the SoundCloud mobile app and select Import: