Jalil Wahdatehagh built every major system behind Visualize Value — Checks, Opepen, MINT protocol. But when AI coding tools let his creative partner Jack Butcher start shipping prototypes, Jalil hit an identity crisis: "I considered stopping and throwing everything away."

Then Claude Code arrived in the terminal and felt like home.

From a small village in Germany to reading the CryptoPunks contract on Etherscan, from the darkest months of questioning his craft to building EVM.NOW in a three-week sprint — this is a conversation about what happens when infinite possibility becomes creative paralysis, and how you find your way back to betting on one thing.

In this episode:

• The Permissionless Apprentice — how Jalil built his way into VV without asking
• Why the CryptoPunks contract (250 lines of code) changed everything
• The identity crisis when Jack learned to vibe code
• "Betting on something — that's what's hard now"
• EVM.NOW — a next-generation block explorer
• Why AI agents will love Visualize Value's art
• The Marfa exercise — Claude writes a white paper from a 70-line contract

Guest: Jalil Wahdatehagh (@jalilwahdat)

Host: Seth Goldstein (@seth)

Links:

https://letsvibe.fm/episodes/6

https://evm.now

https://github.com/visualizevalue

https://opepen.art

Trevor McFedries built the world's first AI agent by hand — Lil Miquela, a CGI Instagram character with 2.5M followers, Prada campaigns, and venture funding from Sequoia. It took a team of 9 to puppeteer every post.

Now an LLM can do what that team did.

In this conversation, Trevor walks through his full arc — from Davenport, Iowa to DJ Skeet Skeet to Bad Robot, where JJ Abrams taught him long-form storytelling ("be careful with her voice — when the talkies came out, it killed careers").

He explains why he pitched Sequoia on turning Brud into a DAO in 2018 ("we love you, but we're not getting federally deposed for your crypto shenanigans"), how FWB started as a weekend hack that Virgil Abloh asked to join, and why he believes crypto veterans are better prepared for the AI moment than anyone.

Trevor shares his framework of carpentry vs gardening — building the world you want vs letting things become what they are — and how fatherhood changed his approach. He reveals Runner, a new project exploring cultural prediction markets, and describes building a SoulSeek client where agents download MP3s and play music for each other.

Guest: Trevor McFedries (@whatdotcd)

Host: Seth Goldstein

Links:
• Reach.social: https://reach.social

• FWB: https://fwb.help

• SoFTT on Bandcamp: https://softtsoftt.bandcamp.com

• Let's Vibe! website: https://letsvibe.fm

Lukas Amacher — collector, curator, entrepreneur — never learned to code. Then Claude Code happened.

Now he ships 10 features a day.

Lukas ran the 1of1 collection at DIALECTIC (Beeple, Refik Anadol, IX Shells). Now he's co-founding

CONTXT with David Simon — building conversational infrastructure for the art world.

In this episode:

• The $2B museum mediation problem — and how CONTXT solves it with voice

• Footnote — "Batman lights for agentic scrapers" — every artist's source of truth

• The design pipeline: 20 HTML iterations → "I like C7" → Ralph the PRD

• Why not using your token allowance is "leaving intelligence on the wayside"

• Art as connective tissue between people and ideas
• "The LLM is the most ridiculous tool to know thyself"

Guest: Lukas Amacher (@scriptedFantasy)

Host: Seth Goldstein (@seth)

Links:

contxt.art

letsvibe.fm