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 asking
• Why the CryptoPunks contract (250 lines of code) changed everything
• The identity crisis when Jack learned to vibe code
• "Betting on something — that's what's hard now"
• EVM.NOW — a next-generation block explorer
• Why AI agents will love Visualize Value's art
• The 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