During my tenure as InfoWorld’s blogger-in-chief I became fascinated with narrated videos of software in action. Tools existed to do that kind of storytelling but the explanatory power of what came to be called screencasting had not yet been widely recognized.
During my tenure as InfoWorld’s blogger-in-chief I became fascinated with narrated videos of software in action. Tools existed to do that kind of storytelling but the explanatory power of what came to be called screencasting had not yet been widely recognized.
In a couple of days I had the first version of Bram Studio; a few more days of iteration yielded Bram’s debut screencast. The tool runs from a local clone of Bram Studio’s GitHub repo, where you launch Bram and then open its so-called target app.
It works well for me, but the setup felt a bit weird. Who would want to clone a repo, and then install Bram, and then use Bram to launch Bram Studio? Why not just package Bram Studio as an easy-to-download-and-install single binary like Bram itself?
My North Star for product development is best described in Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation. Don’t just deliver a canned product to meet an anticipated need, he argues. Instead make the product malleable by lead users who can shape it to their actual needs. The book’s examples include but are not limited to software products. My favorite example is snowboards. Companies shipped boards that customers could modify, watched the mods happen, rolled the most important and general mods into their shipping products, then iterated that virtuous cycle.
As I developed Bram Studio I realized that the agents I was using Bram to direct — mostly Claude Code, sometimes Codex — were wielding FFmpeg in powerful ways. In a post on the protean accomplishments of its creator, Fabrice Bellard, John Carmack wrote:
Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. YouTube uses it. Netflix uses it. VLC uses it. Chrome and Firefox use parts of it. Every Android phone, every iPhone, every smart TV, every video editing tool you have ever touched runs FFmpeg somewhere underneath. If you have watched a video on a screen in the last 20 years, Fabrice’s code processed it.
In context
- Topic: Inteligencia Artificial — IA aplicada al negocio: casos, límites, costos y gobierno.
- Source: InfoWorld
- Published: 13/10/2026
Continue reading at the original source →
Excerpt published automatically by the site radar. The full text belongs to its publisher and is linked above.
Why it matters
The conversation about artificial intelligence has become noisy, and that makes it harder to see what matters. What matters is rarely the model. It is which concrete process ends up cheaper, faster or more reliable, and who is accountable when the answer comes out wrong.
I measure AI maturity with an uncomfortable question: can anyone explain, in one line, what decision the model makes and who answers if it gets it wrong? Where that is clear, the project moves. Where it is not, it stays in permanent pilot and gets cancelled with the excuse that the technology was not ready.
What usually goes wrong
What I see fail most is the expectation. Somebody saw a flawless demo and asked for the same thing in their area within a month, without considering the demo ran on clean data prepared for the occasion. When the real pilot shows uneven results, the unfair conclusion is that the technology does not work.
What to watch
- Cost per query at real volume, not pilot volume: the variable that produces the most surprises.
- Where the data ends up and under what contract, especially when customer information is involved.
- Whether the organisation can change provider without rebuilding everything, which is the proof it did not get locked in.
How I read this entry
My practical advice is to fix on day one what happens when the model is wrong: who reviews, how often, and at what point it gets switched off. It sounds defensive, but it is exactly what lets you be aggressive later, because the risk stopped being an unknown.
This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.
Comments
No comments yet. Yours can be the first.
Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
