Of Brasas & Nube
Translation Note
This is an English translation of a piece originally published in Spanish on the Tacos de Datos Substack. The original Spanish version explored these themes for a Spanish-speaking audience interested in data and technology.
part 1: 6 weeks, 6 projects, 4 products
Stolen Time
In six weeks, I stole 350 hours from a future that never existed. (Is stealing time a federal crime? Don't deport me.)
While I cooked dinner and watched Netflix, AI agents were building in a parallel reality. They executed my ideas at an accelerated pace, generating work from which I reaped the rewards. The result: four working products that would have taken months of traditional development.
This parallel reality produced:
- 121 features shipped
- 4 live products launched
- 22 critical fixes deployed
All while I lived my normal life. No late nights. No missed movies. No sacrificed weekends.
But here's the tension: how do we value work that no one did? What happens to an economy where time itself becomes elastic? When anyone can build in parallel time, what makes anything valuable?
This is the story of how I built a constellation of tools without sacrificing a single minute of my real lifeâand what this tells us about the future of human work.
The Constelation
Amoxcalli: Natural Memory, Amplified (57 tickets)
Your brain never stops weaving connections. A morning traffic pattern sparks a systems theory insight. "Loco, no soy el mĂĄs bueno, yo soy el mas aferrado" suddenly illuminates your role in the AI revolution. These threads of thought, invisible but constant, are what make us human.
But they're also fragile. Each connection exists for a moment, then fadesâlost to time, to sleep, to the next thought demanding attention. We accept this as the natural limitation of consciousness.
Amoxcalli emerged from this tensionânot to replace these fleeting moments, but to give them permanence. It's like having a shadow self that never sleeps, never forgets, never stops connecting:
- While you drive, your voice captures an idea.
- While you sleep, the system weaves connections.
- While you work, patterns emerge naturally.
- While you live, your network of thoughts grows.
But what happens when your thoughts outlive their moments? When connections keep growing without you?
The technology is simple: voice capture, semantic networks, invisible interfaces. But the implications are dizzying: a parallel mind that builds while you rest, connects while you forget, grows while you live.
It's not artificial memoryâit's natural memory freed from time. But maybe time was the point all along. Maybe the beauty of human thought lies precisely in its impermanence, in the way each connection must be rediscovered, each pattern seen anew.
Or maybe that's just what we tell ourselves because we never had a choice before.
Fieldnotes: Designing Moments of Wonder
There's a moment every teacher knows: when a student's eyes light up with understanding, when confusion transforms into clarity, when a lesson transcends its content and becomes an experience. These moments are pure alchemyâpart preparation, part intuition, part inexplicable magic.
But they're ephemeral. You can plan for them, hope for them, but you can't manufacture wonder. At least, that's what we believed.
Fieldnotes began as an experiment: could we map the DNA of wonder? Could we analyze thousands of magical teaching moments and extract their patterns? The result is unsettling in its effectiveness:
- You describe a feeling you want to evoke, and algorithms suggest proven paths to wonder.
- You sketch an idea, and AI personas offer variations, each targeting different learning styles.
- You build a lesson, and machine learning predicts emotional resonance, suggests adjustments.
It works. Maybe too well.
What does it mean when inspiration becomes predictable? When we can manufacture moments that feel spontaneous, engineer experiences that feel organic? Some teachers embrace itâfinally, a way to reliably create those transformative moments. Others resistâarguing that true wonder can't be reduced to patterns and predictions.
Both are right, probably. But we're past the point of choosing. The question isn't whether to use these tools, but how to use them while preserving what makes teaching human. How to harness pattern recognition without becoming slaves to the pattern.
The technology is just code interpreting data. But in education, data is human experience, pattern is emotion, and optimization means shaping how people learn to see the world.
Alnilam: The Star That Guides
We still navigate careers like ancient sailorsâby fixed stars, steady paths, predictable horizons. Three years of experience. Five years to senior. A decade to director. These markers made sense when time moved at human speed.
But what happens when time becomes elastic? When you can compress a year's worth of iterations into a week? When your commits span parallel timelines, and your changelog reads like science fiction?
Alnilam emerged from this paradox. Living in the terminalâwhere time is measured in commits and progress in pull requestsâit watches as traditional career paths collide with parallel development:
- Your git log shows three months of work done overnight
- Your project history spans multiple temporal threads
- Your experience grows in parallel dimensions
The data tells an impossible story: you're simultaneously a junior dev and a system architect. A beginner and a veteran. Present and future tangled in your commit history.
The old metrics break down. What's a "year of experience" when you can run a thousand experiments in parallel? What's "senior level" when your AI agents are shipping features while you sleep?
Yet somehow the stars still matter. Maybe more than ever. Because in this elastic time, we need fixed points. Not to follow blindly, but to question our trajectory: Are we actually growing, or just moving faster? Are we becoming better developers, or just more efficient producers?
Alnilam doesn't answer these questions. It sits in your terminal, quietly logging as you bend time, offering data but no judgments. A reminder that even in parallel timelines, even with AI acceleration, the hardest navigation is still internalâknowing not just where you're going, but why.
It's not artificial career planningâit's a compass for elastic time.
BNS Studio: Honest Brutalism, Joyful Design
In an era where AI can generate infinite complexity, we chose brutal simplicity. When algorithms can create any design, we stripped everything bare. BNS Studio began as a landing page and became a rebellion: what if we built something deliberately basic in a world of instant sophistication?
The manifesto wrote itself:
- Show the scaffolding
- Celebrate the structure
- Let the machine be a machine
- Make buttons look like buttons
- Give words room to breathe
- Hide nothing
- Load instantly or don't load at all
It's almost funnyâusing parallel time and AI acceleration to build something that looks like it could've been made in 1991. But that's the point. When you can generate anything, the most radical act is choosing to build almost nothing.
The site loads instantly because it has almost nothing to load. It works offline because it barely needs the internet. It's accessible because there's nothing to make inaccessible. Every element exists because it must, not because it could.
In a parallel reality of infinite design possibilities, we chose finite constraints. Not because we couldn't do more, but because we shouldn't. A reminder that even with godlike generative powers, beauty often lies in restraint.
It's not anti-technologyâit's technology that's honest about what it is.
Project Rainfall: Your Natural Study Space
We named it Rainfall because that's how knowledge should feel: natural, nourishing, inevitable. Not a storm that shows off its power, but a steady rain that helps things grow.
But first it was "AI Study Workbench" (very San Francisco, very $8 coffee). Then "Brainstorm" (peak Silicon Valley). The names evolved as we understood what we were actually building: not another AI tool, but a space that preserves the natural rhythm of thought.
It started with a simple observation: thinking happens in the gaps between apps. In the moments between capturing and connecting, between reading and understanding. Every context switch is a moment where insight might escape.
Rainfall closes these gaps:
- Your keystrokes capture without breaking flow (ââ§C for vision, â„Space for voice)
- AI runs locally, processing privately, respecting your machine's power
- Your thoughts stay whole, uninterrupted by cloud sync or connection drops
The technology disappears. Not because it's hidden, but because it fits the natural shape of thought. Like rain falling exactly where it's needed.
It's our most honest project yet. No parallel processing. No time manipulation. Just technology shaped to human rhythm. A reminder that even in this age of infinite acceleration, some thingsâlike understanding, like insight, like wisdomâstill need their natural time.
Or maybe that's just what we tell ourselves as we build tools that bend reality. Maybe we're all just trying to make peace with these new powers, finding ways to make them feel as natural as rain.?
What I Discovered
The Paradox of Parallel Time
We thought AI would automate our work. Instead, it created a parallel dimension where work happens without us. Not replacing human effort, but existing alongside itâa shadow reality where our intentions execute while we sleep, while we rest, while we live.
The 350 hours that built these tools never existed in my timeline. They were borrowed from a future that won't happen, executed in a present I never experienced. What does it mean to create value in time that technically never was?
The Tension of Natural Artifice
Each project began with the same goal: extend what humans naturally do. But extension became transformation:
- Memory beyond biological limits
- Wonder reduced to algorithms
- Experience compressed into parallel threads
- Design stripped to brutal honesty
- Thought flowing like rain
We aimed to amplify human capability. We ended up questioning what "human" means.
The Death of Scarcity
Time was always our scarcest resource. Every hour spent coding was an hour not living. Every minute debugging was a minute not creating. Or at least, that's how it used to work.
But when work can happen in parallel time, when development can occur in dimensions we never experience, scarcity dissolves. And with it goes everything we built on that foundationâour notions of value, of effort, of worth.
The Questions That Remain
The technical problems were the easy part. The hard questions are the ones we're still afraid to ask:
What happens to human creativity when every idea can be instantly manifested? What's the value of expertise when time becomes elastic? How do we measure growth when experience can be parallelized? What remains fundamentally human when every natural limit can be transcended?
A Final Question
I stole 350 hours from a future that will never exist. But maybe that's not quite right.
Maybe I didn't steal timeâmaybe I discovered that time was never what we thought it was. That our neat divisions between past and future, between work and life, between human and machine, were always more arbitrary than we admitted.
Or maybe that's just what we tell ourselves as we learn to wield powers we don't fully understand, building tools that feel like rain but move like lightning.
Either way, there's no going back. The only question is: as we bend reality to our will, which parts of our humanity are we willing to let bend with it?