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Published · transcript-backedSteve Newman: preference
19 Apr 2026 The Cognitive Revolution Vibe-Coding an Attention Firewall, w/ Steve Newman, creator of The Curve
“I go out for a walk so I can be in a different headspace. And so what I've settled into that I really like is what I will do that's sort of work-ish while I'm out walking is I'll have some project I'm working on.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Steve Newman
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 19 Apr 2026
- Publisher
- The Cognitive Revolution
Transcript context
…Maybe the last practical question, and then we'll zoom out and try to take stock of what all this means. Any voice or mobile strategies? For me, again, I want to get out of my desk. I want to be on my feet instead of my ****. How do I do that? It's still a work in progress for me, for sure. Any tips in that direction? I see people talking about the remote control or whatever, and Claude, and all these terminal emulators and their phone and stuff. Those articles go in the pile of really good ideas for improving your vibe coding skills that I pile up and never look at. And then I sort of realized, kind of like what I was saying is I don't want to optimize Claude's time, I want to optimize mine. When I'm out for a walk, and I do that too, I get out for walks a lot, both physical and mental health, I think it's really good. And to sort of give yourself brain space for deeper thought, I'm a big fan of that idea. But I don't go out for a walk so I can get five more prompts in. I go out for a walk so I can be in a different headspace. And so what I've settled into that I really like is what I will do that's sort of work-ish while I'm out walking is I'll have some project I'm working on. Maybe it's the next blog post I want to write or next piece of analysis I want to do. But maybe it's the next app I want to build in Claude. I'll just like, it'll be percolating in my head while I'm walking, and then I'll pull my phone out, and then I'll just dictate a brain dump of ideas about whatever it is. So if it's an app, you know, okay, so I want, you know, I'll just ramble out feature lists and design decisions and design questions and, you know, whatever, just brain dump of high level thought about it. And then this is a simple trick I read somebody talking about that's worked really well for me. So you just take that brain dump and you paste it into whatever LLM and you say, organize this. And you pretty much just literally say, here's my brain dump, turn this into a cloud code prompt. And I usually then won't even bother to read what came out. It's usually good enough that I would rather wait to note it, like, Hey, you did this wrong. Like, it's more efficient for me to let it go through all the work, and then notice, like, No, you misunderstood my brain dump. I wanted this to work this other way. Rather than rereading its three-page cleanup of my brain dump. Yeah, so that's what I do, remote. And what I said, like, this feels ridiculous, but the actual tool chain there is I open the Gmail app on my phone, I click Compose, I type my own e-mail address, I click in the mail body and I click the dictation button on the built-in keyboard. And I am sure this is not the best way to do it, but it's always there. It always works. I don't have to worry whether the recording got saved, you know, so that's my process. Cool. So one thing I'm going to do after this is take the transcript and run it through a planning session and say, you know, go figure out all the good ideas here that can apply to our setup and I definitely think there are going to be several, at least. I mean, getting some hooks going. I'm struck by the fact that I have built almost no custom UI for myself at all. A lot of skills, but basically nothing that sort of presents things to me. And I'm realizing now, like, that's a gap and a half, you know, even just in terms of like producing the podcast, I've started to do more. This is one of the classic paradoxes I find of AI where I'm like, I wanted to be more efficient. What I ended up was doing more in maybe the same or maybe even a little more time in some cases. Because one thing I'm doing now that I do get some positive comments on, but mostly nobody cares, is making a custom song for every episode. And there's a time factor there where I got to listen to the song to figure out which of the versions I like. So it's definitely not a time saver. I do enjoy it. I make art YouTube thumbnail type stuff and, you know, make clips, video clips to help promote the thing on Twitter. And I realize I should have a UI where I can go look at what's been produced. I'm like still digging around file systems and sometimes I'm like scrolling back in the terminal to go find the links that it, you know, printed out above. And looking at your setup, I'm like, boy, was I dumb for not thinking of something a little bit more like that sooner. So This is why I wanted to do this, because I think I was pretty sure that there was going to be a few, not even technical unlocks, because I probably don't need-- there's almost nothing probably that we've talked about here that Claude can't figure out how to actually implement for me without even needing to get into the details of what you've done. But just the conceptual sort of scales fall from the eyes moments are quite useful.…
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