This week at Try Hard Studios - January 23, 2026

My friends, hello.

Life sped up a lot over Thanksgiving, and unfortunately it hasn't slowed down yet. Last week I was in San Francisco, meeting with some people and seeing some friends. I can totally see why people move out there! I get it. The energy out there is insane. It really does feel like the center of the tech world. I got to see more of my industry friends in those two or three days than I usually see in a year.

I'll probably try to get out there every couple of months just to see people and make connections.

Last week, I also revealed the new site and landing page for faster.dev. As you'll recall, I've been building a lot of stuff with AI, and this is my attempt to help people learn how to do that as well. The reception was very good. I'm very, very, very proud of the video that I made for it, which you can find here.

I'm excited to get this out the door. I do feel, of course, time pressure to get it all done, but I'm feeling optimistic about my abilities to get there!

As always, the only way out is through.

Thoughts from the week

I'm still thinking a lot about what our future looks like, as it seems like we're living through an AI takeoff. One thing that I have, I think, solidified on is that for me, and for probably many indie makers or indie builders or small business owners like me, I don't think the right thing to build is something in the AI tooling space.

Let me explain what I mean. I see a lot of people building multi-agent conductors and agent managers and that sort of thing, and it all seems super fun. But I think the bigger opportunity right now is to take some of those things that other people have built and build something that is not in that space. Most of the energy and most of the competition right now is inwardly focused. So all the big labs are building AI tooling. A lot of the big tech companies are building AI tooling. And then all of the tinkerers and makers and hackers are all building AI tooling. The competition is extremely fierce, and anything that I can do, a lot of other people can do as well.

What do I do? What do I build? What is my unique advantage that can't just be copied by Cursor or Claude Code? I do think teaching and content is one of my unique advantages, but there are also industries that I know better than other people that have yet to be touched by AI. I was in property tax for five years! There's a lot of stuff there that could be built now that is going to take a long time for Claude Code to actually touch. And I think there are a lot of those opportunities out there.

A lot of the stuff that I'm building is still developer adjacent, but it's certainly not trying to outpace the big AI tooling companies, because I just can't do that. My life is not congruent with that sort of speed. As a one-man operation and as someone who still values time with my family, I just have to decide that certain things aren't within my purview.

I hope you'll forgive me for going on and on across many weeks about trying to figure out what to do with my life, but that is certainly the biggest thing on my mind right now, and hopefully it's helpful for you to hear me process it!

🎬 YouTube

Infinite, shareable volume storage with Hunter Leath, Archil CEO

Hunter Leath, CEO of Archil, explains how they’re building a “universal storage engine” that sits between your apps and S3, making an S3 bucket behave like a fast, POSIX-compatible disk for containers, servers, and even Lambda. Along the way, we dig into how their SSD-backed clusters and custom protocol avoid the usual small-file pain and where this approach shines (and where it doesn’t). Check it out on YouTube or your favorite podcast player.

Things I found this week

Just a heads up that each Twitter/X screenshot has a link to the original post if you want to go follow the account.

The beans having to take turns made me laugh out loud. But beyond that, I do think it's easy to tear ideas down, and it's easy to get torn down by other people making fun of your ideas. Knowing which advice to take and which advice to ignore is a skill that I have cultivated over many years, but I'm still far from perfect at.

One day, when I get a building…

I'm not sure how this old tweet came up in my feed, and if I've shared it with you before, well, you get to see it again. This is a big part of my decision to move into teaching AI. That is the hand I have. That's the hand I've been dealt, and I'm going to play it as best I can.

One of my internet friends recently released a new project where he teaches people how to craft good UI. I immediately bought it because it just looks so gorgeous. I think it's a good lesson for me that putting your heart and soul into the craft can still make you stand out.

That's one of the things that I'm grappling with: if everybody can build everything, what's the differentiator? I think one of the differentiators, as shown by this, is that if you put your heart and soul into the craft, it still puts you miles ahead of everyone else, even if everyone else can build super quickly.

I do believe that almost everything you want is on the other side of being embarrassed. I think a lot of people hold themselves back because they don't want to either publicly fail or get made fun of, but you become free the moment you realize that nobody cares. Or if they do, it doesn't even really matter.

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That’s it for this week! I enjoy reading all of your replies, so if you see something interesting or just have a thought you want to share, please hit reply and let me know.

Talk soon,
Aaron

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