Get Your Hands Dirty

the mess is the point

“Ew, disgusting, my hands are SO dirty.”

My four-year-old stared at her palms like she’d committed a crime. We were pulling weeds, making space for new seeds. Soil under her nails. On her clothes.

She’s always been like this. Wipes the smallest crumb from the dinner table. Mess IS the enemy.

I laughed. Then realized she’d already learned what takes most adults decades to unlearn: that mess is something to avoid.

VCs aren’t supposed to build. We’re supposed to evaluate, advise, deploy capital. But last week I built three products with Opus 4.5. Nothing fancy. Random ideas, scratched together over a few days. Building is how I stay in touch with what these models can actually do.

When I shared them, the first question was always the same:

“What prompt did you use?”

Not: what problem were you solving? Not: how did you think through the architecture? Not: what did you learn?

What prompt.

As if there’s a magic incantation that skips the work. As if I could hand over a string of text and they’d get the same result without the same process.

Building is messy. There’s no prompt for that.

I’ve watched this play out hundreds of times. Founders asking which framework gets you to product-market fit. Engineers wanting the tutorial before touching the code. Operators requesting permission before solving obvious problems.

Permission from whom? Their manager didn’t stop them. The company didn’t stop them. They stopped themselves.

Most people wait for the job description to change before they change what they do. Wait for someone to tell them it’s okay.

They’re asking themselves for permission they already have.

And it’s not like they don’t have time. You spend an hour on TikTok. An hour on Instagram. But an hour messing around with something to see what happens? That’s somehow different?

AI made this worse, not better. People think there’s a “right prompt” hidden somewhere, and if they just find it, they’ll get the output without the input. They want the Instagram version of building. Clean. Filtered. No visible effort.

But the people who actually build things know: the mess is the point. The wrong turns teach you the terrain. The failed attempts reveal what the tutorials skip.

Every framework gets you to a local maximum. Someone else’s local maximum. The global maximum requires going off-road, getting lost, getting your hands dirty with problems no one’s mapped yet.

In a world where AI handles the predictable, agency plus curiosity is all that’s left. The willingness to tinker without a guide. To build without permission. To get dirty without knowing if it’ll work.

The next big thing always looks like a toy at first. The only people who recognize it are the ones already playing.

My daughter wanted to wash her hands the entire time. Still does. That part didn’t change.

But she learned how seeds become plants. How roots need space. How something has to be pulled out before something else can grow.