I keep having this recurring dream.

Snow-dusted mountains radiate in the distance as drops of dew absorb the glow of an early morning. I walk around barefoot, shuffling through soft patches of grass and clumps of dirt, flipping over rocks in hopes of glimpsing the alien lifeforms crawling beneath. The air is crisp and full of the sounds of a world coming to terms with a new day. It’s all so beautiful and familiar.

The scene is a fragmented memory from my early childhood. Back then everything was more external. Life consisted of freeform adventuring throughout my hometown, playing games with neighborhood friends, and soaking up as much information as a young mind could. My attention was mine to direct, and my default was to cast it outward toward the fascinating reality around me.

Waking up from this dream always evokes a sense of longing. I’m 27 now, living the career-maxxing adult life, and fighting to remain authentic in a world that’s hell bent on inching me closer to conformity. It doesn't help that I spend the vast majority of my time staring at a screen, but that’s not the core problem. The real issue is the slow, almost imperceptible shift in attention that’s caused me to stray from a full-time active participant to an increasingly passive consumer.

You (yes, you) know just as well as anyone that I’m not alone in this struggle, and it’s one of the main reasons we’re building Plicity. At its core, Plicity is a platform designed to help people use their attention in ways that expand their creativity. If attention is our most precious resource, then how we direct it—and what incentives shape that direction—matters enormously.

In her 2025 book Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, Nadia Asparouhova writes:

“Attention is not something we merely own, it is what we are. Learning to wield it isn't just about returning to the present moment, but about creating infinite, dazzling realities—because what we choose to see in the present moment is unique to each of us.”

We may not have the power to construct the reality around us in its entirety (yet), but we can construct vivid realities within. The things we give mindshare to, whether active creation or passive consumption, shape who we become.

For me, one of the clearest examples is my daily commute. Twice each weekday, I choose between three options:

1. Listen to music

2. Listen to a podcast

3. Drive in silence

It sounds trivial, but the impact of my decision compounds over time. Across 240 workdays, each with two 30-minute drives, I spend around 240 hours (ten full days of my year) inside this decision space. My brain, like yours, is pattern-driven and finite in capacity. If I spend the majority of a particular week’s road time immersed in music, I’m far more likely to pick up my guitar over the ensuing weekend.

Ralph Waldo Emerson put it even more directly:

“That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.”

Screens aren’t inherently the enemy—but the incentives behind them often are. Much of the online world is designed to steer attention toward consumption, not creation. Even with the best filters, it’s easy to get pulled into loops that leave us passive, overstimulated, and unfulfilled.

Plicity is our attempt to push back. From the very beginning, three principles have guided our decisions:

1. Interactive and social by default
   Not just likes and comments. Posts (or as we like to call them, expressions) exist as interactive sandboxes. Others can remix, extend, and transform them in real time, leaving behind creative lineages that evolve through collective imagination.

2. Code as self-expression
   Not sterile dashboards or one-off widgets, but living, playful, and deeply personal pieces of software. Part art, part technology that others can explore and reshape.

3. Beyond dopamine loops
   A platform where curiosity, creativity, and meaningful interaction replace endless scrolling. The reward isn’t in the next hit of novelty, but in the satisfaction of building, sharing, and evolving ideas together.

In a way, the dream I keep having is the blueprint: a world alive with possibility, where exploration is natural and attention is directed outward toward what fascinates us most. If we can capture even a fraction of that feeling inside a digital space, we can contribute to a world worth waking up to.

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My first taste of coding showed up late to the party and pulled an Irish goodbye.

It was the fall of 2017 and I had just declared design as my major at Seattle University. Despite leading a busy double life as a student athlete and aspiring bedroom producer, I wanted to challenge myself to find a minor that would compliment my degree. As I browsed the course catalogue, computer science quickly stood out as a promising option.

The more I thought about it, the more the vision crystalized in my head: an artfully discerning, technically-proficient craftsman equipped with all the tools and lingo needed to pixel-push his way to eternal glory. Sounds pretty good, right?

Much to my surprise, my guidance counselor wasn’t so sure. I bounced into his office full of enthusiasm, but I was soon met with a concerned look.

“Have you ever coded before?” he asked. “Our computer science courses are difficult and time-consuming, are you sure you’ll be able to balance this with design and baseball?”

I’ve always leaned blindly deterministic, so it didn’t take long to convince him (read: myself) that I was up to the task.

The only issue was that the intro course had to be paired with calculus and I hadn’t attempted a math problem since junior year of high school. So, naturally, I had a competent friend take the online placement exam for me. A true stroke of genius. I ended up lasting about a month in CS101 before returning to my counselor with my tail tucked and a philosophy alternative in mind. Hello, Reality!

Despite all the quality one-on-one time with Nietzsche, I’ve always looked back on this choice with regret. I can’t claim to be a life-long computer nerd or an avid gamer, but I’ve always felt an undeniable pull towards technology. The allure of endless creative potential speaks to me deeply, but the steep technical language barrier has a way of making one feel like a perpetual outsider looking in.

Enter LLM’s.

I’m disappointed to admit that I have no recollection of my first time using ChatGPT. I do have faint memories of listening to Lex Fridman talk about this thing called “AI”, reading Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, and soon after stumbling upon a job posting at a startup incubator in Orange County. This was back in late 2023 when I was still living in Seattle.

Fast forward nearly 2 years and I’m having full-blown conversations with ChatGPT on my mid-day walks, only to return to my desk and proceed designing alongside Claude, Midjourney, and any other AI tool I can rationalize spending $20 a month on. I suspect this evolution will continue to feel like an enchanting fever dream, but there’s one chapter of the story I recall with more clarity: my first time vibe coding.

Like many, I began my journey with AI using it mostly as a substitute for search. I found it exciting and helpful, but that was about it. It was a utility. At this point I wasn’t able to feel the larger shift taking place, but it was only a matter of time and tinkering.

Weekends slowly transitioned from days full of recording music to an even split between music and AI exploration. Building custom GPT’s became a source of joy and astonishment. Meta prompting became a bottomless toolbox for extending curiosity. I began to realize that this technology was not only shaping my creative interests, but also changing the way I interfaced with the world.

It’s one thing for an LLM to summarize text or answer a question, but it’s another thing entirely for it to grant you the power to do something you never thought possible.

My first taste of this came on April 16th, 2025. This day marked the release of o3, OpenAI’s industry-topping model that pairs multimodal capabilities with advanced reasoning. In mortal tongue, that means it’s good at analyzing images and it thinks things through before responding. As I sat there and watched the livestream release, I quickly realized this was a game changer. I had a number of ideas for small software-based projects, but none had been acted on outside of some URL purchases. The time was now.

As soon as I got home from work I opened up a new GPT project and wrote a set of instructions for o3. I crowned it my technical co-founder and had it draft a business outline, propose a tech-stack, and create a series of sprint plans to get the ball rolling. Within two days I managed to whip up a decent UI, connect it to a database, deploy a working sign-up flow, and in the process uncover a newfound appreciation for what’s possible in this emerging AI world.

It wasn’t long after that I was up to 200,000 daily active users and investors were blowing up my inbox like I had just invented fire. Life itself began to transform into a wondrously complex vortex of ...

Okay this isn’t one of those stories, at least not yet. My idea wasn’t very strong and I spent an ungodly amount of time trying to build a system I didn’t understand. But the outcome of that project isn’t the point. The larger takeaway is that I was able to do something I never thought possible without a proper engineering skillset.

To say this was exhilarating would be a massive understatement. Here I am, a mere designer with no technical knowledge, building functional prototypes with little more than plain english and a healthy dose of persistence. My code-fluent friends couldn’t believe it!

What’s important to understand is that vibe coding is only going to get easier for us technical laymen. Its been four months since o3’s release and we’ve already seen new products like Base44 go viral with the promise of delivering software-based superpowers to anyone with an idea and a keyboard.

But while these products are growing rapidly in popularity, most users are living within the confines of what’s been possible up until now. Analytics dashboards, onboarding flows, and many other creations with familiar faces are being generated by the minute. Don’t get me wrong, this ability is incredible, but the output itself is not necessarily new or paradigm shifting.

In last week’s post, I talked about how Plicity is interested in exploring the edges of what a new type of content could look and feel like. If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that humans always find ways to surpass expectations when they’re exposed to a new medium to work within.

Software itself certainly isn’t a new medium, but its always had an exceedingly high barrier to entry. This reality is changing rapidly and we’re eager to see where the collective mind takes things from here.

Until next week. 🤘🏼

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It’s rare for an idea to hit you all at once. Many of us like to think it will thanks to Hollywood’s obsession with earth-shattering revelations, but most of the time it’s not so immediate. An idea might take on a thousand forms before it hardens into something malleable, but once it does it can be shaped into a vessel for exploration.

The exploration itself is a distinct challenge, one I’m confident I’ll have more to vent on in future pieces, but how does one get to the point of setting sail? How does one know when an idea is worthy of conviction? If the Plicity team had the answer we’d probably be building the world’s most opinionated AI consultancy, so for the time being we’re at least moderately convinced that ignorance is bliss. And as we continue to build, I suspect we’ll come in close contact with a truth I’ve grown to appreciate deeply:

Ignorance, in its rawest form, is much more than bliss. It’s potential energy.

For those of you with the poise to sit through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the notion of Classical vs. Romantic understanding might ring a dizzying bell. To put it simply, it’s the idea that there’s a fundamental split between reason and intuition, or between how we understand the world intellectually versus how we experience it directly. Another way to think about it would be two opposing lenses through which we interpret reality—one that dissects and explains, and one that feels and appreciates.

What’s important to understand about this split framing of the world is that there’s room for both perspectives to co-exist, in fact it’s imperative that they do, for each pillar of perception has a lot to learn from the other’s perceived “ignorance”.

Modern society offers many ways to frame this concept, but one particularly compelling example is the recent rise of vibe coding. If you aren’t familiar with the term it may be worthwhile to get yourself up to speed, but let’s set one thing straight: the name is ill-equipped for the future. It’s almost as if it was intentionally coined to make anyone identifying as a “vibe coder” feel a slight jolt of self deprecation. But branding aside, we’ve all been embracing the vibes lately, and what we’ve found is that interesting things tend to occur when people with different worldviews and varying levels of technical expertise take hold of an LLM and prompt little pieces of software to life.

Left in the hands of a software engineer with a Classically oriented mind, you might get “a rotating cube filled with particles that adhere to an impressively realistic physics engine”. Satisfying. Pass it off to a musician turned product designer (yes, Romantically oriented) and it’s only a matter of time before a “cosmic jazz fusion piano that plays like a tongue drum” materializes before your eyes. Rad. The list goes on and on, and for what it’s worth, many of the final outputs aren’t all that awe-inspiring. But some of them are.

These select few, the ones that surprise and delight, got us thinking. What does this new shift in software creation mean for the world? What are the ripple effects that will extend beyond the tech scene? What will non-technical people do when they can create with code? These are hard questions to answer holistically, but one thing we’re convinced of is that people will find new and exciting ways to express themselves.

Another thing we’re convinced of is how one-sided much of social content has become. If software is eating the world and AI is eating software, short-form videos are feasting on the attention span of a concerning percentage of the global population. Over the past year, daily views on YouTube Shorts increased from 70 billion to 200 billion. That translates to roughly 8.3 billion views per hour, 139 million views per minute, and 2.3 million views per second. This doesn’t even include TikTok or Instagram Reels.

To anyone who has built a life creating this short form content, I applaud your entrepreneurial spirit and wish you great fortune, but what about all the passive consumers out there? Aren’t there any better alternatives that provide a more active form of engagement?

Substack does an elegant job answering this question by providing a home for the introspective among us. X answers boldly by maintaining an open pasture for real-time dialogue. But what we’ve yet to see is an answer for the emerging community of vibe creators.

And so, if there is a different, software-centric space, what does it look like? What types of minds does it provide a new playground for? That’s what we’re in the process of figuring out at Plicity. We know that (1) we want it to be interactive and social, (2) we want to empower a non-technical audience to express themselves with code, and (3) we want to move past the lizard brain dopamine loops that drive much of today’s platforms.

Outside of these three convictions, we believe that an open dialogue with the world is in order. Instead of making assumptions about how people might explore this new terrain, we’re working to put something thought-provoking into their hands and soak up as much information as possible. In other words, we’re working to become a sponge for a new wave of self-expression.

You can join the waitlist by subscribing to The Pliciteer.

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