Andrew McCalip
@andrewmccalip • 79,941 subscribers
EIR and "hardware guy" at @paradigm Accidental ad empire @https://kickbacks.ai Former:Founding team @VardaSpace Former:Co-Founder Cosine Additive,acquired by GE
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After nearly six incredible years building spacecraft, I’m beginning a new chapter as an entrepreneur in residence (EIR) at Paradigm. Varda was a grand adventure and a one of one experience I’ll cherish forever. I had the rare privilege of joining the founding team and helping take a wild idea from zero to one, from a blank sheet of paper to hypersonic vehicles coming home from orbit. I’m incredibly proud of what we built together. Thank you to Will, Delian, and the whole team. Paradigm is giving me something incredibly cool. I’ll have the freedom to search for the next important thing worth building. This might look like a radical departure, but I see it as a chance to step back, look broadly, and follow my curiosity. An EIR sits somewhere between researcher, inventor, and founder in waiting. Paradigm feels like a natural home for that kind of exploration, full of earnest nerds who pair deep technical curiosity with research. My role is to explore important problem spaces, develop conviction, run experiments, and eventually turn the most promising direction into something real. In many ways, it feels like a natural extension of my hobbies and passion projects. I’ll be in SF during the week and LA on weekends. I want to use that time to meet as many interesting people as I can. Let’s get coffee and talk about energy, compute, artificial intelligence, and manufacturing. I want to hear about your most ambitious ideas and deepest technical rabbit holes.
Andrew McCalip379,006 views • 1 month ago
Turns out the UI couldn't parse the negative RPM value to slow it down 😂
Andrew McCalip509,045 views • 1 year ago
Immaculate vibes from the deck of Project Bob So far the score is: autonomous boats: 0 ocean: 3
Andrew McCalip132,995 views • 6 months ago
Took the morning to mess around with Opus 4.6. My go-to model eval is always the same. I ask for a one-shot, browser-based STEP viewer plus a tolerancing/markup app. Took me two coffees to get it running. This is what I constantly beg every US-based online manufacturer to offer. I think it’ll be a game changer for the industry. Everyone hates parsing paper drawings, so we default to blanket .005 tolerances. Go a tiny bit further and let users tag a few faces. There’s a nugget of the future in this approach. Probably half stupid. Definitely inappropriate for some parts. I know, I know. I deal with real aerospace-grade drawings every day. My hands still wet with coolant as I type this. Still has the taste of the future. Anyway, I digress. Basically a PDF equivalent for CAD. Turn a STEP file into a traveling source of truth by layering metadata onto face IDs. Colors, threads, tolerances, notes, whatever. The model isn’t the CAD file anymore. The STEP plus its annotations are. Of course it’s never actually one-shot. It’s an hour of back and forth. Tight loop. Tiny spec changes. “No, not like that, like this.” I run the same test on every new GPT/Claude release. I’m still not sure I’m good at programming. I just know how to ask for things clearly, write specs that don’t leak ambiguity, and iterate like a maniac until the thing works. Manifest the idea into existence, then it becomes the spec for the next iteration. Humans are awful at defining requirements upfront. You manifest the idea into something real, then that artifact becomes the spec for the next loop. This feels like the primary skill of the future. It’s project management, but hyper-accelerated. Micro-management. Pico-management. An iteration speed you could never ethically apply to humans. And I’m slowly realizing the harness isn’t for the model. It’s for me. I’m the bottleneck. The model can sprint forever. I’m the one that runs out of clarity. Anyway, this is a throwaway idea. Maybe some YC kids will raise on it. Whatever. Ideas are cheap. This took an hour. Repo link below. Have fun.
Andrew McCalip161,802 views • 9 months ago
the vibes from the DARPA heavy lift drone competition are immaculate. great commentary, strange machines, ambitious teams, and everyone seems to be having an absurd amount of fun. between this and the humanoid half marathon in china, i think we're going to see a lot more of these public engineering challenges. i've always dreamed of starting an XPRIZE / Grand Challenge. maybe the world is finally ready for the olympics of machines.
Andrew McCalip21,239 views • 3 months ago
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