447: ‘A Sociopathic Father’, With Adam Lisagor

Adam Liesegor, welcome back. Let’s skip the warm‑up and dive straight into Vision Pro.

Happy to. I spun up Sandwich Vision to explore Vision Pro. We started with Television, a playful virtual TV for your space, then aimed bigger with Theater, a virtual cinema. The original dream was first‑run films, but that’s a fortress. So we launched live events, including your show, and then Jose Marquez cracked it: partner with the giant‑screen and planetarium filmmakers hungry for more screens. Now we’ve built a strong library, we sell tickets in Theater, and we also showcase Apple Immersive Video alongside Apple’s own channel with mutual respect.

I fell for VisionOS’s interaction language and wanted that feel on Mac. A year and a half ago I tried building a Mac app that let me manipulate windows with my hands, hit OS‑level walls, and paused. After six months of AI‑assisted building on other projects, I came back, and in a few weeks I had Hovercraft working. I could grab a window, move it, and feed it to Zoom. The big change was treating AI as a creative partner, not a code vending machine.

Hovercraft surprised me. I assumed it was sprawling, but it’s focused and you grok it in minutes. Allen Pike shredded your onboarding with kindness, you delayed a night, fixed everything, and when I finally tried it I shot you a stream of notes. You shipped most of them overnight. That velocity shows.

That feedback made it better. Allen’s first‑run walkthrough hurt in all the right ways, and your notes raised the bar. I love moving fast when the direction is clear.

For the record, I’m not all‑in on AI, but it’s obviously real. Allen Pike’s enthusiasm for code generation is contagious, and Hovercraft is my favorite proof that a non‑programmer can ship something sharp. You’ve always been a director more than a coder—Birdhouse, then Sandwich—so this fits.

Exactly. I think of it as creative‑directing software with software. Many creatives already have the instincts—taste, communication, iteration. With AI tools, that becomes a canvas. It’s been the most creatively fulfilling work I’ve done.

On tooling: I live in Cursor, which feels like VS Code with an agent that can read your repo, run CLIs, commit to GitHub, and operate your stack. Model choice matters. I bounce between Claude and OpenAI when stuck. Sonnet 4.5 was a leap, but Opus 4.7 has been my daily driver even though it’s pricier. I treat token spend like hiring labor—usually about 150 to 200 dollars a day across everything I’m building.

My scale is smaller. I chat with GPT for little scripts and proofreading, copy‑paste the results, and stop there. I get why that doesn’t scale to apps, and your budget lines up with what I’m hearing from serious teams.

Cursor unlocks more than code. Give it a folder and it can organize a mess, narrate its thinking, and collaborate like a thoughtful partner. Context is everything. I save rules so I’m not repeating directions, start fresh chats for new features to keep models sharp, and treat each transcript as institutional memory.

I exported six months of build transcripts and distilled them into an expert called Lysigore, inside my broader Portable Expert platform. Now I consult Lysigore before and during builds. It catches issues early, sharpens plans, and boosts my hit rate.

It sounds wild, but Hovercraft shipping in two weeks makes it hard to argue. That’s not normal indie‑Mac‑dev timing.

I still don’t believe in set‑and‑forget. I keep multiple agents running but check in constantly, answer their questions, and make choices. That’s the creative‑director loop, and it’s the fun part.

It’s the film‑director model. You may not touch the camera or cut the footage, but you’re guiding every decision. That’s how you make something cohesive without micromanaging or disappearing.

Totally. AI coding doesn’t replace human collaboration for me. It multiplies it. My team and I build more, faster, and it’s still satisfying because we’re present for the choices.

Name check: Hovercraft is perfect. You’re literally hovering your craft on screen. I also asked for a paste‑from‑clipboard option so I don’t have to save an image just to drop it in. And for listeners, Hovercraft runs as a virtual camera in Zoom, FaceTime, StreamYard—anything that lets you pick a camera—so your overlay shows up right in the call.

Clipboard paste is on my list. I also shipped live drawing on the frame before this taping. Hold D to draw, and for lefties, hold semicolon. There’s a little switcher to flip foreground and background too.

Where does Lysigore live? And how does it talk to Cursor?

Portable Expert is a React Next JS platform with a browser extension, plus Figma, Framer, and Canva plug‑ins. Through the Model Context Protocol, it can sit in the same workspace as Cursor, pull the right material, and remember what happened. Think of MCP like a more flexible, language‑aware API.

That’s like an AppleScript dictionary for the AI era. Fantastical’s MCP is a good example of how tools expose schedules or data to an agent without brittle endpoints.

Cursor even drives Xcode for me—dev builds, DMGs, notarization. And this week it generated a big suite of unit tests so I catch breaks before I run the app. Apple’s permission prompts still scare users by calling it “screen recording,” so I built a clear, step‑by‑step onboarding.

We did slip into a cookie detour—Japanese Noir versus Oreos and Numenos—and it was delightful. I’m team half‑stuff; you’re team quadruple‑stuff.

Guilty. And if someone runs a Pepsi‑challenge for Oreo‑style cookies, I’m in.

Hovercraft also fits our bigger thesis: the future of media is layered in space. We’ve unified the layering tech behind Theater and Hovercraft into a shared protocol and file format, so we can place digital things in physical contexts elegantly.

I love when tech levels up so fast you can feel the step change. It’s exciting while the edges are rough, and then it settles in.

Some changes land like a snap; Retina on iPhone 4 was that for me, and even that old Canon XL camcorder felt like a leap toward film before we remembered it was still video, just way better than what came before.

Filmmakers lived through those awkward transitions with early digital video and megapixels, and we are back there now with immersive video where the cameras are incredible but the workflow is slow and hungry.

Quick check on Sandwich Video—your studio is still active while you focus on building tools like Hovercraft that started inside the team, right?

Yep, a tight team of twelve, still making client work, and now building software too; I shifted to AI to bottle our process so it scales, basically turning Sandwich into software.

On Vision Pro, I am still optimistic; output was capped by those Sony microdisplays, so even with more heat they could not have sold ten times more, and that rumor of Apple bailing does not square with anything I hear.

Walking away would be nuts; there is too much at stake and it still looks like the next era of computing.

More likely the next model changes form and price, because nobody thinks a heavy visor with a tethered battery is the end state, and in the meantime you already see niche wins like eye surgeons using it during procedures—that is how platforms often take root.

Maybe apps are not the headline here; it is the OS‑level environments and the content pipeline, not a corner‑shop of little utilities like on phones.

I do worry developer goodwill is low and Vision OS requires fully bespoke work, but like Apple Watch, this might be more about experiences than apps; Apple keeps hiring, rolling out immersive pieces, and even adding basketball games.

I watch the flyovers and that BBC orchestral show, and it feels startlingly present; nobody is going to declare four K at thirty frames per second is where we stop.

It reminds me of the first Macintosh—early, aspirational, and not something you wear all day yet—but it points the way.

Pro tip, try it without the light seal; I work for hours that way on a huge Mac virtual display, and it is funny that a device sold as VR is often most useful when you are not sealed in.

Thanks for coming on; I am learning this AI wave in public, and I think a lot of listeners with app ideas can finally start building. Hovercraft proves it—it is a tight native Mac app and not bloated at all—what does it cost?

Nineteen dollars for one license or twenty nine for two, one time.

No subscription, and there is a free trial, right?

Seven days; please send feedback, because early users already shaped features like disabling hand gestures, and Hovercraft lets you layer, draw, type, and share windows with live compositing.

We will link it; your story shifted my sense of what AI can do right now, and if you think AI only spits out sloppy code, try Hovercraft and see how much you can actually build.

Thank you for having me—this was a blast.