The Cloud Surfing Jupiter Founding Manifesto

The work around the work

I've been playing guitar for most of my life. I've written songs, recorded records, played in bands, taught guitar, built websites, programmed software and started more creative projects than I care to admit. One thing I have learned is that the actual act of creating something is only a small part of a creative life.

Around every song there are files. Around every record there are schedules. Around every website there are updates. Around every application there are bugs. Around every creative business there are emails, notes, backups, lists, passwords, graphics, metadata, social media posts and twenty-seven other things that somebody has to remember. Sometimes that somebody is you.

I have probably lost more song ideas than I have finished simply because I didn't capture them properly when they arrived. Technology has made capturing ideas dramatically easier, but it has created another problem: now we can capture everything.

Thousands of photographs. Hundreds of voice memos. Years of notes. Hard drives full of recordings. Ideas scattered across applications and devices. The problem is no longer simply remembering something. The problem is finding it again.

This is one area where I think artificial intelligence becomes genuinely interesting. Let the machine organize some of that. Let it transcribe. Let it search. Let it summarize. Let it remind me that six months ago I recorded a guitar riff at 1:14 in the morning and then completely forgot about it. That seems useful.

What I don't want the machine doing is deciding what that guitar riff should become. There is a big difference. And somewhere inside that difference is the philosophy behind Cloud Surfing Jupiter.

Automate the friction. Protect the authorship.

This has become the simplest way I can explain my approach to AI:

Automate the friction. Protect the authorship.

There is a great deal of friction around creative work that has nothing to do with creativity. Organizing files is not songwriting. Renaming photographs is not photography. Updating a database is not writing a novel. Searching through four years of notes for something you vaguely remember writing is not particularly creative either.

If artificial intelligence can handle some of those things, terrific. Give me that hour back.

But not all friction is bad. Learning to play an instrument is difficult. Writing a good song is difficult. Developing taste is difficult. Learning when not to play a note can take years. I have no desire to remove those struggles because those struggles are part of becoming good at something.

There is an important difference between eliminating unnecessary work and eliminating the work required to develop a skill. A guitar player does not improve because somebody else practiced for him. A writer does not develop a voice because a machine generated ten thousand paragraphs. A filmmaker doesn't develop visual instincts by simply selecting the first image a model produces.

The technology should help clear the runway. The human being still has to fly the airplane. Hopefully not into a mountain.

Your voice still matters

One of the lessons I learned very early playing guitar is that you can spend years trying to sound like somebody else and still eventually sound like yourself. When I was young, Eddie Van Halen was practically a supernatural being to me. I studied guitarists I admired, learned their songs, chased their sounds and tried to figure out what made them different.

But eventually something happens. Your experiences get mixed into everything you learned. Your hands are different. Your ears are different. Your emotional life is different. Your mistakes are different. And somewhere along the way, if you're lucky, a voice develops.

AI presents a fascinating problem because it is very good at producing things that are perfectly acceptable. Perfectly acceptable writing. Perfectly acceptable graphics. Perfectly acceptable ideas. Sometimes even surprisingly good ones.

The danger is not necessarily that AI produces terrible work. The danger is that it produces competent work so easily that we stop asking whether the work actually sounds like us. That is a much harder question.

When you use these tools, you have to be willing to say: No. That isn't what I meant. That doesn't sound like me. That's too polished. That's too safe. That's technically better, but I liked the other one more. Leave the weird part in.

That ability to reject something may become one of the most valuable creative skills in the AI era. Because when a machine can produce endless possibilities, the creative act increasingly becomes choosing what deserves to survive.

The razor's edge

I keep coming back to the image of walking a razor's edge. There are two easy positions to take with artificial intelligence.

The first is to reject the entire thing. AI is bad. AI is fake. AI is theft. Real creative people don't use it.

The second position is almost the exact opposite. Automate everything. Generate everything. Produce more. Publish faster. Replace every task that can possibly be replaced.

Neither approach interests me very much. The interesting place is somewhere in between. That position requires a little more thought because the answer changes depending on what you are doing.

Should AI organize my recordings? Probably. Should it write my songs? I'm not interested. Can it help me explore an idea? Absolutely. Can it suggest an angle I didn't think about? Sure.

Should I blindly publish whatever it creates? Absolutely not. Can it help me build an application I might never have had the resources to build by myself? Now we're getting somewhere.

That middle territory is the razor's edge. Use too little of this technology and you may ignore a tool capable of expanding what one creative person can accomplish. Use too much of it and you risk removing yourself from the process altogether.

Cloud Surfing Jupiter is about exploring that line. I suspect the line will keep moving.

A musician, a programmer and a bunch of experiments

I also don't want Cloud Surfing Jupiter to become a website where I sit around discussing artificial intelligence theoretically. There are enough people doing that.

I would rather build things. Some will work. Some won't. Some will probably seem like a fantastic idea at midnight and completely ridiculous the next morning. That's part of the fun.

One of those experiments is iGuitar Journal. The concept behind iGuitar Journal existed long before today's AI systems. I built it around something I learned from teaching and practicing guitar: improvement becomes much easier when you can remember what you were working on, measure what changed and honestly evaluate what needs more attention.

AI makes that idea much more interesting. Imagine finishing a guitar practice session and having a system remember what you practiced, what frustrated you, what improved and what you said you wanted to work on next. Then you pick up the guitar three days later and your journal remembers where you left off.

The AI isn't playing guitar. It isn't replacing a guitar teacher. It isn't developing your fingers. It is providing continuity. That is exactly the kind of technology I want to explore.

The same thinking applies to other projects I am building: organizing creative archives, building better memory systems, experimenting with AI co-hosts, programming tools and trying to find practical ways to reduce the enormous amount of administrative clutter that surrounds a creative life.

Some of this gets very technical. Some of it involves guitars. Often those two things collide. Welcome to my world.

High Strung Productions is the reason for all of this

There is another piece of this that keeps the whole experiment grounded.

High Strung Productions is not an AI project. It is where the music lives. Songs. Recordings. Performances. Creative work.

In my journey in this life, I have accepted that society has decided that the way the music industry was as I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s was going to change. Music has become "free," for everyone to do, but the gatekeepers are all about the money. If I had a million dollars to spend on seeking publicity for my music, I know I have several songs (out of the hundreds I have written) that would be on everyone's phone. But I don't have a million dollars, and if I did, I wouldn't spend it on that.

I have accepted the world as it is. I may absolutely despise Spotify, but my music is on it. I don't despise people who love Spotify and use it without a care for the struggles of the artist. That is also not what matters. What matters is what you do with your creative spark—your uniqueness in this limited lifetime that we have.

When I pick up my guitar, I play the same G chord that every other guitarist has played since 1925. I am not entitled to anything in this lifetime. I create music and write songs because it's what I love to do. High Strung Productions is my own space to do that without risking anything but my own time and joy in the creative process.

AI may help me organize the material surrounding it. It may help build websites, manage archives, develop promotional ideas or find something buried on a hard drive.

But at some point, somebody still has to pick up the guitar. That matters.

Otherwise we end up in a strange circular world where AI helps us build AI systems so we can create videos explaining AI systems to other people who are using AI systems to summarize the videos. Somebody has to make something.

High Strung Productions represents the thing all of this technology is supposed to protect. THE ART.

Collaboration also means responsibility

I have no problem describing AI as a collaborator. It can be a very useful collaborator. But calling something a collaborator doesn't remove responsibility from the human being.

If I ask an AI system for twenty ideas and choose one, I made that choice. If I use a paragraph it generated, I am responsible for whether that paragraph belongs in something with my name on it. If AI writes code for an application I release, I am responsible for making sure that code works. "The AI did it" is not a particularly useful defense.

Creative work has always involved tools and collaborators. A record producer doesn't personally play every instrument. A film director doesn't operate every camera. An architect doesn't drive every nail into a building.

What matters is judgment. Why did you make this decision? Why did you keep that part? Why did you remove another? Does the final result represent what you intended? Are you willing to put your name on it? Those questions matter much more to me than debating whether every individual word or pixel originated inside a human brain.

No AI panic. No AI religion.

There is something else I want Cloud Surfing Jupiter to avoid. Artificial intelligence has somehow created both a panic industry and a religion.

Every week brings another announcement claiming some new model has changed everything forever. Sometimes the announcement is genuinely impressive. Sometimes three days later nobody remembers it happened.

I don't want to contribute to the anxiety. You do not need seventeen AI subscriptions by Friday. You probably don't need seven autonomous agents having meetings with each other while you sleep. And if you spend six hours configuring an AI system designed to save you twenty minutes, it may be worth reconsidering the system.

I say that as someone who has absolutely spent six hours configuring an AI system designed to save twenty minutes. There will be plenty of that here too.

Cloud Surfing Jupiter should be a place where we can say: This tool is amazing. This one is useful. This one isn't ready. This one wasted my entire afternoon. This one did something I genuinely did not think a computer could do. And this one is apparently trying to destroy my filesystem.

No panic. No worship. Just curiosity.

Did it help you create?

There is one question I want to keep asking throughout this project. Did the technology help you create something that mattered?

Not: Did you use the newest model? Did you build the most complicated workflow? Did you automate the greatest number of tasks? Did you generate the largest amount of content? Did you spend your entire weekend rearranging your AI stack?

Did you create? That is the test.

Because technology can become another spectacular form of procrastination. You can spend all day improving the machine that was supposed to help you do the work. Then midnight rolls around and the song still isn't written. I've done that too.

The point isn't maximum productivity. The point isn't maximum automation. And artificial intelligence is definitely not the destination. The destination is whatever mattered to you before all of this showed up.

The song you wanted to record. The application you wanted to build. The book you wanted to finish. The photographs you wanted to organize. The film you wanted to make. The business you wanted to start. The strange idea you've been carrying around for ten years.

Maybe these tools can help shorten the distance between the idea and the finished thing. If they can, I want to know how.

So what is Cloud Surfing Jupiter?

Cloud Surfing Jupiter is my ongoing experiment in creativity, technology and artificial intelligence. It is where I intend to document what I am learning while actually using these tools to create things.

There will be music. There will be software. There will be experiments with local AI models and enormous cloud systems. There will be successes. There will be failures. There will probably be occasions when I contradict something I wrote six months earlier because the technology changed or, more likely, because I changed my mind.

That's fine. This isn't a doctrine. It is a journal of the trip.

Why me

I love people. I love being alive in this moment. I graduated from SUNY Oneonta in 1995 with a music business degree. I have been bitten by this AI bug—this unknown yet vast potential.

I got clawed into this AI interest thanks to Peter Steinberger's amazing OpenClaw harness back in late February 2026, and I have been an active contributor to Alex Finn's (Affiliate link) Vibe Coding Academy on Skool. And it is exciting!!

I recently submitted a fix to Garry Tan's MIT-licensed Gbrain project, specifically to "preserve dream JSON and extracted-page totals" (#4890). You don't have to understand the technical details, but basically the fix is intended to make AI memory processing more reliable. Gbrain is an open source memory project.

Open source is what I advocate for—building your own AI that belongs to you and only you. I've contributed to other open source projects, specifically a few Drupal core commits. In my living as a web/app developer, I can do this—and I can help you find solutions that will work for you.

A few principles will keep guiding it:

• Human creativity comes first.
• Automate the friction. Protect the authorship.
• Use the technology without surrendering your voice to it.
• Take responsibility for what you create.
• Build things, test them and talk honestly about what happened.
• Stay curious without letting the technology consume all of your attention.
• Create what matters.

Artificial intelligence may turn out to be one of the most useful creative tools ever invented. Or maybe twenty years from now we'll look back at some of what we're doing today and laugh. Probably both.

Either way, I want to explore it. Carefully. Creatively. With an open mind, a reasonable amount of skepticism and, whenever possible, a guitar somewhere within reach.

Welcome to Cloud Surfing Jupiter. Let's see where this goes.