Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I’m writing this as I’m still processing this excellent article: Something Big Is Happening — matt shumer. It is long, but honestly I would rather have you read that than this post.

Even for people in the tech industry, it’s difficult to explain how fast AI is improving. At work, one of my main responsibilities is literally to figure out what new tools and capabilities we can apply to our team and then help the team grow. Even with 100% of my effort focused on this, I feel like I’m holding on by my fingernails. It’s not fear that robots are taking over but a realization that things are changing faster than any of us expected. We are watching chapters worth of history books fly by every day.

For example, last week I was out sick for a couple days. The morning when I finally felt well enough to check messages, a non‑technical friend asked me what it was like working with AI. I joked that I’d been gone for two days so I was probably already behind. Then I logged in and… sure enough, a brand‑new, ground‑breaking model (Claude Opus 4.6) had dropped, and my programming tool (VS Code) had released features that make it even easier to work with multiple coding agents at the same time. I spent the entire afternoon just absorbing what had changed.

The pace of change is difficult to describe. Last summer I was mildly interested but it was clearly just a toy and most of the demos were hype. In the September, Claude Sonnet 4.5 came out and I could see how it was on the verge of being legit. On Nov 24, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 and it was the inflection point. It was clear to anyone using it that there was no turning back. Opus 4.6 came on Feb 5 and OpenAI’s Codex models are surging too. People ask me what this is going to look like in a year. Who knows? I can’t even tell you what next WEEK will look like.

So yes, if you’re in software engineering, this is life‑altering in a way we’ve never seen before. But the key point is that this will change your life too. Whatever your job is, AI is already working to make parts of it obsolete. It’s a general‑purpose skill amplifier. That means whatever you’re already good at, AI can make you dramatically better and faster at it. This rewriting of reality matters for everyone, not just for people in tech. Here’s how to position yourself:

• There will always be people around you who think this is all hype and the fad will pass. Do your best to bring them along, but the most important thing is to make sure your future isn’t tied to their denial. If it’s your management chain, find a new job. If it’s someone you’re thinking about hiring, keep looking. Denying AI’s usefulness today is like believing in a flat earth. It is provably better right now. This isn’t up for debate. Don’t waste energy arguing with people who refuse to see it. You gave them a chance to come along. If they resist, they’ll get left behind. Honestly, it might already be too late for them to catch up.
• You might not be able to predict exactly how this will change your job, but you can keep yourself relevant by leading the way. Be the person who keeps up, uses these tools to undeniable effect, and teaches others how to do the same.

Back in December, I would still try to soft pedal all of this when I was in a group that I knew was mixed on AI. I did not want to sound dramatic or turn them off even more with my enthusiasm. But week by week, that is getting harder to do. The gap between people who use these tools and people who do not is widening so fast that it feels strange to pretend nothing is happening. I would normally end this by saying the future is now, but honestly it feels more like the future was last week and we are all just trying to catch up to it.

I’ve written previously about the 2022 upgrade of our church’s AV booth, but it feels like it’s time for another update, and I also want to include a full list of all our gear in case its helpful to anyone else.

• Mackie ProFXV3 16 audio mixer
  • We basically got this model because I counted all our possible inputs and then wanted a little headroom. We don’t really use any of the extra functionality over the smaller versions.
• Two PTZ Optics Move SE 12x cameras
  • I LOVE these! It’s hard to stomach the price initially but it’s definitely a “buy once cry once” situation. More details: PTZ Optics Move SE Review – Studio711.com – Ben Martens.
• Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro video switcher
  • This has dramatically simplified our video situation. It takes care of various resolutions and framerates, records to a USB key (or connects to the computer), and allows me to perfectly syn the audio input with the video input.
  • I also enjoy having this be its own device. Some day we’ll probably move to something like OBS running on the PC, but for now, it’s really nice to have a device that “just works” without worrying about any updates or configurations.
  • This device also supports streaming directly to YouTube or Facebook but we haven’t started that yet.
• Shure microphone setup
  • Pastor:
    • BLX1 Wireless Bodypack Transmitter
    • Shure DH5 DuraPlex Omnidirectional Headset Microphone
      • This is an upgraded microphone that fits Pastor better.
  • Shure BLX24R/SM58 Wireless System with Rackmountable Receiver and SM58 Microphone Capsule Band H10
    • We usually have this by the piano. We aren’t often recording/posting piano stuff but it helps us amplify the piano volume during the services to make sure people can hear it while they are singing.
• Mackie C200 speakers
• QSC GX3 300-Watt amplifier
  • I would not buy this again. There’s nothing wrong with the product, but it’s extremely overpowered for our space. We usually leave it on volume 2/10 and I’m pretty sure that if I turned it up much past 7 I could damage the building. We were coming from an extremely underpowered system so I guess I overshot the goal.

So our whole setup is PC independent. Once the service is done, we take the thumb drive out of the video switcher, plug it into the PC, and upload to YouTube.

We also updated our internet service from DSL to business cable and now our service is reliably at least 200Mbps symmetric. Uploading is usually done before we can finish entering the metadata!

We have a TV in front of church that is mostly used to show quick videos after church but is rarely also used during a sermon. We can control that from the balcony using an HDMI over Ethernet extender. This adds about 200 ms of video lag but we take care of this by using VLC for playback and adjusting the synchronization in the VLC settings. The TV in front of church is set up as a second monitor on the balcony PC so we can prep content privately and then drag it over to the TV in front of church. Via an HDMI splitter, that front TV feed also gets sent to an input on the video switcher. This lets us show the sermon PowerPoints directly in the video recording with perfect quality.

We have a great crew that is trained to operate this booth. Our sweet spot is around 4-6 volunteers. That is big enough that we don’t feel like we’re doing it too often, but we also do it often enough to remember how it works.

If you’re curious to see what it all looks like, check out CalvaryLutheranWA – YouTube. I edit the shorts after the fact, but pretty much everything else posted on that channel comes straight out of the AV booth with no post processing.

If someone gave us a bunch of money to upgrade this, I could easily spend it, but unless we get asked to start live streaming the whole service or something like that, I think we’re in a pretty good spot with our setup … for now.

Let’s take a quick minute to update where we are at with AI in my daily job. It’s changing so quickly that it’s hard to organize my thoughts around it.

Over the last year (and even the last 6 months), AI coding agents have gone from “overhyped party trick” to “fundamental necessity”. A lot of that comes from advancements in models (Claude Opus 4.5 is my current favorite) but it also comes from us learning better ways to interact with the models. There’s still too much hype, but my personal daily reality has been permanently altered by these new capabilities. At this point, coding without AI feels as unthinkable as coding without StackOverflow or a search engine did last year.

Stepping back for a moment, it’s good to note that Large Language Models (LLMs) are a great fit for software development. If you think about training a model on the English language, it’s a mess because there are so many different styles and rules and unwritten rules and colloquialisms, etc. But with code, there the languages are strictly defined and there are intense levels of documentation for every piece of every language. This gives the AI agent a very well-defined playground to do your bidding.

What really pushed this tech over the edge for me was learning to start by having it generate documentation about the work it was going to do. I’d explain the requirements, have it generate a plan, and then iterate on that plan document until I was happy with it. Then I’d have the agent tackle pieces of the plan, step by step, verifying its progress along the way.

I can’t tell you how much faster I’m able to get projects done! There have been two giant projects floating around in the back of my mind for years at work, but I could never justify the time to do them. Not only did I get them both done in just a few weeks, but I did it in my spare time at work without slowing down the rest of my job. My output is skyrocketing and it feels like I have a new superpower.

I have no idea where this is going or how it’s going to change our jobs in the future, but I don’t think it will be too long before I’ll move up the “AI management” ladder. Instead of directly commanding one agent at a time, I can imagine telling a “manager agent” what I want and then letting it create its own agents to do different parts of the job and make sure they’re all still heading toward the goal. That’s potentially another order of magnitude increase in my output. After nearly 20 years at the company, I have a very long backlog of ideas to try, but now I’m wondering if that list is long enough. I can churn through ideas so quickly now and see which ones pan out.

“Will AI take coding jobs” is a common question but my answer is that if your job is typing in code, then yes, you’re in trouble. But if your job is seeing things that can be improved and solving problems, then this is an incredible tool amplify your impact. In that case, AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI more effectively than you might.

I distinctly remember sitting in a Computer Science class at Purdue around the turn of the century (I might as well own it, I’m getting older) where a professor was trying to convince us that the model of paying once for software was going away. He certainly was right. Everything is a subscription now, and those subscriptions can be a huge drag on your financial future. I feel like we are pretty careful about any recurring subscriptions, but let’s review them and see how we’re doing:

• Amazon – At $139/year, this isn’t cheap, but we use it a lot. I know there are various feelings about shopping at Amazon, but I love all the extra family/hobby time it gives me because I can just have stuff show up instead of driving around in traffic trying to find some random item.
• Monarch Money – After Mint closed, I was looking for new personal finance software and I’m happy that I landed on Monarch. It’s $100/year well-spent. It’s what I’m using to write this post because I can easily find recurring bills. If you only do one thing for your financial future, spend time every month categorizing your transactions and keep a solid understanding of where all your money is going. If you want 50% off your first year, consider using my referral link.
• Comcast Internet – I keep costs low here by buying my own modem, getting the cheapest plan I can find, and setting an annual reminder to sign up for a new one year contract at a lower price. We currently pay $56/year for 500/30 service. That’s way more download speed than we need (I lived fine with 100Mbps until very recently) but this was the best deal when it was time to renew. Pro-tip: don’t let them upsell you on speed. You will almost never notice the difference between 100Mbps and 500Mbps. This is coming from someone who works fully remotely and has over 50+ devices on the network.
• Xfinity Mobile – Our total household cell phone bill each month is $25. No that’s not a typo. Xfinity Mobile operates on the same network as Verizon and I can’t tell any difference from when we were paying $80/month for Verizon. That $25 includes two lines with 1GB of shared data. Yes that’s ridiculously small but since I work from home, I rarely need cell data, and, more importantly, knowing that we have almost no data available means that we do not spend any time surfing around on our phones when we’re out and about. If we need to bump up to unlimited data for a month, it’s only $65 total. If you don’t want Xfinity Mobile, there are plenty of other similar companies like Mint Mobile, Boost Mobile, Straight Talk, etc. I don’t understand how the big companies still exist.
• Spotify – Tyla and I both listen to music for much of the day and so we have a the $15/month family plan. It’s integrated into our Tesla too so we get access to our playlists and the full library anywhere we go. And since we have the family plan, it was easy to add Elijah and keep his musical tastes out of our recommendations.
• YouTube – We pay the $15/month to have no ads on YouTube. I’m allergic to ads. Unless there’s no other option, I’d rather not watch something than watch something with ads. This YouTube subscription is permanent. We carefully manage our other streaming TV services, but YouTube is a constant. For now we just share my account, but when Elijah is old enough to get out of his kids account, we’ll upgrade to the family plan. This does include YouTube Music which theoretically should be as good as Spotify but my attempts in the past to switch over have fizzled out. If you love YouTube Music, I’d love to learn more about why you love it.
• Prime Video – I was very frustrated when Amazon nickel-and-dimed us by making it an extra $3/month to get rid of ads on Prime Video even with a Prime account. It still feels very cheap to me, but we’re currently playing it. This is one of the temporary subscriptions. We’ll drop it and move on to something else soon.
• Disney+/Hulu – Again, I pay for the no-ads version at around $21/month. We’ve had this for about the last six month while Elijah and I are plowing through tons of Star Wars content. I’ve canceled our subscription though and starting in December I think we’ll switch over to Netflix for a while.
• Trakt – This $60/year service that helps us keep track of the TV and movies that we watch. It’s especially helpful since we hop around services. When we come back to a service, I can easily see what episode we were on in each show. It’s also a good way for me to remember shows that I want to watch with just Tyla or as a family. There are a lot of different front-ends to Trakt but I just use the standard app.
• Duolingo – I’m almost up to 1900 days on my Duolingo streak. I pay $80/year for this and I’m most of the way through the Spanish program. Once I complete it, I think I might drop Duolingo and switch to another language app that is a little less gamified.
• Tesla Premium Connectivity – This is another splurge that costs us $100/year but it means that our Tesla has a lot of additional features such as streaming music (Spotify!), live traffic, satellite-view maps, live sentry mode cameras, and when we are parked, we can watch video streaming services (with separate subscription) like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube.

I’m pretty quick to drop services that I don’t think are worth the money, and I know what I would drop if we needed to find a little more room in the budget. If you’re curious to learn any more about these services, I’m happy to share why we like them!

If you’re curious about what I’m thinking about at work, three recent videos will help give you a taste.

The first one is a presentation by my manager at the Open Compute Project Global Summit. He talked about how AI training data centers cause massive and rapid power fluctuations which are problematic for electrical grids and introduced the shared approach taken by Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI to solve this.

The second one is Satya. He talks about the development of the Fairwater 2 data center and the path to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). While his scope is obviously way bigger than my team’s, we are closely involved in the projects he discusses.

Satya says that this AI revolution might just be the biggest thing since the industrial revolution. It’s an amazing time to be in this industry and I’m super thankful to have a behind-the-scenes seat for it!

Mark Russinovich is the CTO of Azure. He’s one of the smartest people around and when he gives talks, it’s usually worth a listen. At the recent Ignite conference, he talked about recent Azure innovations architecture and a lot of these (especially the ones dealing with compute resources) are in my part of the company. This one is definitely the most technical of the three videos that I’ve shared here.

In 2020, I built a PC right before COVID hit and all the prices went sky high. This year I built a PC and… prices are going sky high (but thankfully no global pandemic yet.) The PC that I built in September was right around $1500 but now those same parts would cost me over $2500! I knew I was getting a great deal on the video card, but the real shocker is how much memory prices have increased. I paid $240 for two sticks of 32 GB DDR5-6000 memory. That same purchase now would cost $880! RAM prices started increasing almost immediately after my purchase and haven’t stopped.

Prices are climbing because the memory and storage market has been hit with a perfect storm. Manufacturers have cut back on consumer production while shifting more of their supply toward enterprise customers who are trying to meet the massive AI demand spike. At the same time, consumers started increasing demand for new parts.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for this issue to get resolved, but I’m thankful to be writing this on a brand new machine that was bought literally days before the price increases started!

It has been just over 10 years since I was first introduced to a team process called “Golazo”. It as developed inside the company and there wasn’t much information available on it publicly… until recently. I’ve been spending time gathering various documents and recordings about it, attempting to remove any internal jargon, and then publishing it on GitHub. Today I also made a blog post on the official Azure Compute blog.

It’s a bit difficult to get people excited about a team process, but this one has had such an enormous impact on my job trajectory and satisfaction that I’m happy to get to share it externally. I won’t go into the full sales pitch, but here are three of my favorite parts:

• I’m limited to working on two things at once. Context switching and multi-tasking is not only proven to be inefficient, but personally it also adds a lot of mental weight. Focusing deeply on only one or two tasks at a time keeps me from feeling like I’m getting buried and also lets me do better work because I’m not having to reload all the context.
• It’s hard to get people to write documentation, but writing down what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and why I’m doing it does amazing things for not only helping me sort out my own thoughts but also for getting feedback from others, teaching newer team members, and keeping a written history of our decisions. We do this for every task (where a task is something that takes between 1 day and 2 weeks.) It has made the code reviews at the end much more enjoyable because we’re not having architecture arguments after someone spent a bunch of time writing code. Plus, we have a huge knowledge base of information that has just grown organically. I don’t have to waste brain space trying to remember it all because I know I can look it up at any point (and increasingly, I can ask AI questions about it.)
• We succeed and fail as a team. Generally this is fun. Sometimes it is awkward. But forcing yourself to take shared responsibility for everything on the team improves design discussions up front and encourages more ideas about how to make improvements to avoid problems in the future.

This is by no means the most common method of working inside the company, but it’s the best one I’ve seen. There have been a few points in my career where I’ve had the unique experience of starting up a new team or working by myself for a while, and even when I’m working on my own, I still follow this process. It helps me visualize the work that needs to happen, stay focused, and keep a log of my past decisions.

While I tried to organize the GitHub docs into something consumable, I know that it can be intimidating to try to make sense of it all so please feel free to contact me directly for more information!

February of 2020 was the last time I built a PC. I had decided to build something that would do a better job handling video editing because I was just starting to teach myself Davinci Resolve. A month later, COVID hit, prices skyrocketed, and I was spending 5-10 hours a week editing video for our online church services. It was a huge blessing to have that new PC to speed up my work.

Fast forward to today and we’re nearing the end of Windows 10 support. The old PC that I use for a file server, cloud backup client, and security camera server is not able to upgrade to Windows 10 and I’m ready to replace it anyway. But instead of just building a simple PC for that, I decided to replace it with my 2020 PC and that leaves me “needing” to build a new main PC. Yay!

As usual, I spent a long time researching all my options. I recently bought the full license to Davinci Resolve Studio so I was targeting its requirements. I don’t game much on my PC but the video editing is nearly as taxing in many areas. Ken had just had a great experience buying a PC from Skytech Gaming and they had a pre-configured option that was almost exactly what I was planning to build anyway. I ended up building myself anyway because I could save money on the Windows license (with my company discount) and get double the RAM while saving myself a couple hundred bucks. Here’s what I chose:

• AMD Ryzen 7 7800 X3D 4.2 GHz 8-Core Processor
• Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler
• MSI MAG B650 TOMAHAWK WIFI ATX AM5 Motherboard
• Corsair Vengeance RGB 64 GB (2 x 32 GB)
• Samsung 990 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
• Asus PRIME GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB Video Card
• Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower Case
• MSI MAG A850GL PCIE5 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

It was really interesting designing this using AI to help me. It was able to pull in a lot of reference material about my specific use case and compare multiple options so I felt like I was making a pretty educated choice.

All the parts finally arrived and I carved out some time on a Saturday to start the build. Pretty soon, I was very much regretting not buying the pre-built system. The first problem I hit was that I could not get it to POST. The motherboard just showed lights indicating it couldn’t find the CPU and RAM. I hadn’t done a partial test before putting it all in the case so eventually I gave in and completely undid the build, tearing it down to its bare components. It still didn’t work. So I pulled the CPU cooler off, cleaned off the thermal paste, carefully reseated the CPU and… it still didn’t work. I exhausted long checklists and after hours of work, I was nowhere. At this point I was looking up return policies to see if I could just get most of my money back and go with the pre-built system.

But then I finally noticed a line in a response from AI that pointed me to a video where a guy commented that he’s noticed that with recent AMD CPUs, you sometimes have to wait 5-10 minutes after it boots for the BIOS to figure everything out. Huh? It seemed crazy but what else was I going to try. I set a timer and walked away to cool down.

I came back to a glorious green light on the motherboard! I plugged in a monitor and could see the BIOS. Victory!

Almost. You maybe have noticed I started this part of the story with “the first problem”. That’s because when I plugged in my fancy video card, I couldn’t even get to the BIOS. I eventually got to a state where I couldn’t even boot to the BIOS with the video card removed! I had to reset the CMOS by using a screwdriver to jump two pins on the motherboard. I’m not sure if I changed something in the BIOS to get it working or if just reseating the card was what fixed it, but voila, it worked. I was then able to install Windows, add all the drivers, and that was pretty much the end of the build.

Oh and I should also mention that when I took the build apart, I broke the USB header on the motherboard. The specific connector used by Fractal for the front USB ports on the case is pretty much impossible to remove. Numerous other people have apparently had the same problem. I tried to repair it but eventually gave up and just bought a USB hub to sit on top of the case instead. It’s a frustrating reminder of the difficulties I hit, but in the end, it’s not that big of a deal.

With this rocky start, I keep nervously waiting for something to go wrong, but the machine has performed great! I had debated about liquid or air cooling, but the setup I have seems to be keeping everything cool and it’s much quieter than my last machine.

Even better, it runs Davinci Resolve Studio incredibly well! The last video I made for our trip to Yellowstone took 3:50 minutes to render on my old machine but this new one did it in 1:25! And when I’m editing the video and moving around in the timeline, it’s buttery smooth.

I’ll let the old machine sit for a bit before I pave it and turn it into my file server and security camera server. Hopefully this new machine continues to serve me well for many years… and next time I’ll buy a pre-built one.