GoKawiilWhile I slept, my 5-year-old MacBook ran Gemma 4 locally and indexed a year of video May 21, 2026
I'm in the Maasai Mara about half the year, in three-month stretches. Animals out the front of the lodge, motorcycles, friends in the Maasai villages, kids who think a drone is the funniest thing they have ever seen. That's one half of my year. The other half is sixteen-hour days in front of a terminal, Silicon Valley hacker brain on Africa time. Both real, both consuming attention.
The first half is a constant flood of footage from the iPhone, the DJI Pocket, the drone, the Nikon Z8, and lately the Ray-Ban Metas too. There's always something being recorded. Every photographer or videographer I know is sitting on the same problem: an archive that grows faster than they can edit it. The second half is why mine never gets touched.
Airport security somewhere between Nairobi and Spain. Two trays of cameras, headphones, drone bits, batteries, SSDs, more cables than anyone needs. Most of it records something. Almost none of what they record gets touched again any time soon.
Three months ago the lodge's social channels went dark. Not for lack of content; the lodge has years of raw footage across multiple SSDs. The bottleneck was editing time, and my time disappeared. Claude Code with Opus 4.5 (and then 4.6) hit the point in February where you could leave agents running for hours and come back to merged PRs. KaribuKit was going live with its first paying property in the same window. I stopped sleeping properly, started running three or four agents in parallel in the background, and the months when I would have cut reels turned into months when I shipped software instead.
So one weekend I sat down to fix it. The first thing I tried was wrong.
The wrong layer
The initial pitch (to myself, after about an hour of research) was a SaaS stack: Eddie AI for iterative editing, Higgsfield MCP for generative B-roll, Submagic for captions, Buffer for cross-posting. About $140 a month, slick on paper.
Two problems showed up before I ran any of it.
First, generative AI video has no place on a real travel brand. Guests pay $300 a night and up to see the actual place, and mislabeled AI shots equals TripAdvisor crucifixion. Higgsfield out.
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