My new approach to creating and sharing

Over the last six months, I've undergone a serious shift. I changed roles, started building furiously with AI, and found a spark I hadn't felt in years. I was building constantly, obsessed, couldn't stop.

And it was amazing! But it was also a lot to handle. While I'm doing more work than I ever have before, there's also more being demanded of me than there ever has been before.

So I've been rethinking how I work on side projects and publish content. And it's time for a shift.

I can't build ten things at the same time

I've spent the better part of this year building with AI agents, running multiple projects in parallel, standing up custom agent teams, trying to push the boundaries of what's possible. And one of the clearest things I've learned is this: AI hasn't diminished the value of a human. It's elevated it.

The right move isn't to cut humans — it's to elevate the work that humans do. If AI can do someone's job, it doesn't mean they should be fired. It means their role needs to be altered so that their output can be elevated.

With AI, I could spin up a hundred products. One a day. No problem. But it wouldn't be with the care and attention needed to make them meaningfully better than what anyone else could build — at least not in that amount of time.

What I really want is to have a meaningful impact on the creator community — and to do it in a way where I feel balanced in my life and can also make a living. That means I can't be all over the place.

But I still want to move fast. I'm still deeply motivated and inspired to use AI to bring ideas to life. There's so much to explore. So there needs to be a balance — one that is not trying to build ten products in parallel.

Social media is a losing game (for me)

The other realization has been about social media — Twitter, specifically. Over the last year, there was this mass exodus from Twitter to Bluesky in the developer world. For a lot of folks, Bluesky stuck. But it was an unfriendly place for AI conversations, which drove many folks back to Twitter. And Twitter is a cesspool.

I've spent more time and energy tweeting than I ever have in my entire career. I've built tools to help make it easier to get more content out. And yet I've gotten less interaction than before.

I've come to realize that building an audience on social media takes time, dedication, and consistency. Me scheduling out a few posts a day is not going to cut it. The people who have genuine influence through their social media accounts spend hours and hours and hours on it every single day.

And I don't want that to be where my time goes. I believe there are stronger, more impactful ways to build community and connection through technology. Better for our brains and mental health, but also very likely better for meaningful engagement.

Weekly themes, video-first, social as a megaphone

So here's the shift. I'm going to be much more structured about how I spend my side-project time.

One theme per week

Every week will have a theme and a goal. I'll spend a little time each day building in line with that theme, and the building will inform the content. At least three days a week, I'll spend time recording educational material on what I've built or learned.

Video as the primary channel

The majority of my content focus is going into video — creating for my YouTube channel, then distributing what makes sense to the blog and other formats. The output will likely be some combination of video, short-form content, and long-form writing.

Social media as the megaphone

Instead of trying to win at social media, I'm going to use it as a megaphone for the work I'm already doing. Where it makes sense, I'll use it as an interactive engagement tool. But my primary focus won't be scrolling curated feeds and trying to game the algorithm.

And I will continue to research and experiment with other ways to connect with this evolving creator community.

Building the machine first

This approach is designed to let me move fast and stay fluid on a week-to-week basis while following my inspiration. It leaves enough space for the little things that come up but keeps the bulk of my time focused on the high-value work at Netlify.

I'm kicking this off next week. And the first theme is meta: putting in place the tools I need to execute on this whole creation, capture, recording, editing, and distribution workflow. I'll look at what I've already built and what I need to stand up or adjust.

The goal by end of next week is to come away with a working system I can put into practice the following week — which will likely be about establishing a new brand to house all of this work.

Here's to a new era. And now, back to building.