July 6, 2026 2 min to read

Shep 4 Newsletter — July 2026

Welcome to the first Shep 4 Newsletter!

Each month I’ll be using this newsletter to share updates on what I’ve been working on. Each month I’ll pick a project and try to take it from idea to product as quickly as possible, writing about every step along the way. I’ll try to keep it short, informative, and fun!

There are 6 of you subscribed to this first newsletter, and I hope to grow that number over the coming months and years. Feel free to reply and give me feedback. If you reply to this email, I will see it! Especially tell me if anything is broken, because I’m still figuring this out.

Review of Last Month

Last month’s Project of the Month was AIVID, a toolkit for local AI video generation. This project started because I was hired to edit a video using AI, but instead of using commercial software and cloud-based AI models, I wanted to see if I could make a suite of tools that can run locally on my desktop. I have a sweet computer that can run LLMs and image generation, so how hard could it be to do video generation?

Turns out that local video generation is much harder than image generation and text generation! The two main issues were:

A lack of open-source tools. Evidently, the number of open-source video generation tools is far smaller than the number of open-source image generation tools.
Extremely high memory requirements. At 30 frames per second, a 30-second video requires 1,000 times more RAM than image generation!

I built a suite of tools to help mitigate these two issues, but in the end, I could not handle more than a second of video at a time.

In the end, I was able to edit the video for my wife’s client, but I determined that this project is not worth pursuing. The final verdict is Abandon! The beauty of the Project of the Month framework is that I can fail fast and move on to the next thing.

Moving Forward

This month the Project of the Month is building 3D-printed kitchen gadgets to put on my website store, so it won’t be as empty. My other main focus will be expanding from LinkedIn to Instagram and converting some of my Python tips into Instagram Reels that I will narrate.

Stay tuned for more!