The Permissionless Apprentice — Jalil Wahdatehagh (Visualize Value)

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 askingWhy the CryptoPunks contract (250 lines of code) changed everythingThe identity crisis when Jack learned to vibe code"Betting on something — that's what's hard now"EVM.NOW — a next-generation block explorerWhy AI agents will love Visualize Value's artThe 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