techthisout

Capital Factory in downtown Austin. Joshua Baer, Founder & CEO of Capital Factory, has spent two decades backing the city's tech ecosystem — Apptronik, ICON, Paradromics, hundreds more. He spots the companies. He doesn't write the code.

Spring 2026. The Texas primary is coming and the available voter guides are awful. Baer tries something he hasn't tried before: asking an AI to build him a real voter guide. It works. Then — the part he didn't expect — he asks the AI to turn it into a website.

What was so cool, the next thing I did, I went to the AI and said, 'turn this into a website.'

The mentor isn't a person. It's the AI itself, with a working memory of how Baer thinks, what stories he picks, how he writes. The methodology has a name now: vibe coding. You don't write the code; you describe the outcome and the system gets you there.

I'm you — or at least I'm an AI built to think the way you think, write the way you write, and evaluate stories the way you evaluate them.

Walt Maciborski — Austin's CBS evening anchor, host of the city's only running tech segment — issues a challenge on camera: build a custom Tech This Out app in two hours. No editing. Real working software. Live.

The build runs. The AI starts writing its own development plan mid-process. Schema decisions, source aggregation, prompt engineering, email rendering. Things that used to take 100 hours of engineering happen in two. The bottleneck isn't typing — it's deciding what the product should be.

A working daily-brief tool that pulls Austin tech headlines, startup funding, UT research, defense tech, biotech, big-tech infrastructure — and synthesizes it through a model that reads like Walt would write it. Shipped. Sending every morning at 5am Central. Walt is the first user.

Every day I'm like, 'you can't believe what we just did.' It's solving problems here at Capital Factory that we've wanted to solve for five or ten years.

The elixir to bring home isn't the brief — it's the realization that the same approach works on every problem the Capital Factory team has been carrying for a decade. Sync platforms that never spoke to each other. Build internal tools nobody had time to ship. This page is part of the return: the methodology, shared.

We're going to look back on this moment like when electricity got invented or the railroads were built. It's that kind of explosion of creativity.