Video producer at @cogfilms Creator of @WhistlestopX Creator of @wordstudio_ai
Austin, TX
Joined October 2007
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And now for something completely different from the Coots. I’m excited to introduce Whistlestop! An audio tour guide app for iPhone that tells you the stories of the places you drive near. It's made for road trippers and curious commuters who love local history.
Years ago, my wife Anna and I were on one of our many family road trips. She’s in the passenger seat, googling places that we’d passed that she was curious about. A cool building, a historical marker, a ranch. She would read the story out loud.
Then an idea came up. What if there was an app that would find cool stuff around us and just tell us about it automatically?
It kept popping up in my mind, and I floated the idea to anyone who had the tolerance to talk about tech stuff.
Over the last few months we’ve been working to make this real.
It's Whistlestop! An audio tour guide for iOS. It’s great for road trips, but even commutes across Austin have now become educational. There are 12,000 historical markers we’ve added in Texas alone. And thanks to Wikipedia, we have over 500,000 narrated stories, scattered across the USA. You drive near them, and you get the story narrated to you automatically.
🔊 🚗 🌴
You can read about it at whistlestop.guide
ALT Whistlestop Audio Tour Guide. A GPS Tour Guide App for iOS.
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I’ve been working on short documentaries and brand films in Austin for 15 years. Would love to connect with other creators. Here is a demo reel with a sample of my cinematography work:
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I'd love your feedback. Download and take it on your next drive around town. It's on the App store here:
apps.apple.com/us/app/whistl…
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I watched the Midjourney scanner get built from my desk; here's a look behind the scenes
My kid is really into the Alamo and asked me if there are any video games based on it. The next morning I made one in a few minutes with Claude Code. How long can you hold down the fort? alamobattle.com
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Step inside Project Genie: our experimental research prototype that lets you create, edit, and explore virtual worlds. 🌎
Carson Coots retweeted
AirDraw on Apple Vision Pro is incredible when you toggle on physics.
Being able to interact with your 3D drawings makes them feel like they are actually in your room.
Carson Coots retweeted
The great surprise of the technical and financial requirements being removed from coding and video creation is that all the same people are doing it—and that there hasn’t been an explosion of new software builders and filmmakers.
After a decade of the media telling us that the most glamorous life is entrepreneur, filmmaker, or short-form video influencer: no one new jumps at the opportunity when the primary obstacles are removed.
Carson Coots retweeted
I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.
