Meet Doug.
At 74, Doug Sharp is bedridden with long-haul COVID, severe fatigue, and declining motor function. On top of that, he’s losing his eyesight. Simple things we take for granted, like copying a link, can take him 13 minutes because of tremors. Brain damage means he needs information delivered one instruction at a time. Switching context between apps causes PTSD-level distress.
Most people would retreat from technology. Doug is revolutionizing it.
This is the legendary game designer who created ChipWits in 1984, a pioneering programming game that taught kids to code before computers became a normal part of home life, and The King of Chicago in 1987, a title that defined interactive storytelling thanks to its groundbreaking Dramaton narrative engine. But epileptic seizures in the 90s forced him out of the work he loved and pushed him away from the industry at its peak.
We met on Discord, where he was desperately looking for someone to help him fix his #OpenClaw AI agent 🙈 We clicked immediately. Two ex-Microsoft colleagues from different eras who, despite the decades of age difference, recognized punk kindred spirits in each other. This is a man who built his own hang glider and nearly died on its first flight, who had conversations with people like Timothy Leary and Douglas Adams, who had a front-row seat to the birth of the IT industry and helped shape it. And even now, at 74 and facing multiple disabilities, he illustrates comics, writes sci-fi short stories, and actively contributes to indie game development with an energy that would embarrass people half his age.
Doug has turned every limitation into a feature request. His tremors led to voice-first interfaces. His brain-injury constraints created “one-instruction protocols” that make AI more accessible. His need to manage energy sparked human-paced AI collaboration systems where the human controls the tempo of brainstorming.
Working with Doug, I’ve watched him turn what could have been despair into relentless innovation. “If it’s physics-compliant, pour IQ on it” is his motto. He’s not just adapting to disability. He’s designing solutions that will help millions of people interact with technology more naturally.
We started with SPIF (Style-Preserved Inference Flow), trying to solve how artists can preserve their unique voice in the AI era. We ended up with something much bigger: a technology that generates AI images at over 30 frames per second, turning static art into living dreams. But the breakthrough is so unique, and so many unexpected use cases keep emerging, that it takes time and patience to choose which direction to take next.
Learning to work with Doug has been like my early training with second- and third-generation AI models: adapting to small context windows, learning precise prompting, adjusting to mood swings and limitations. The difference is that Doug’s limitations come with 40 years of creative genius and an uncompromising vision of what technology should become.
It takes patience to adjust to his constraints, but those constraints have taught us to build better systems. His “one instruction at a time” requirement pushed me to create interfaces that are clearer for everyone. His energy limits led us to AI that works at a human pace, not a computer pace.
Now we’re building a startup at the intersection of GenAI and Stable Diffusion, where his vision of accessible creativity meets cutting-edge capability. The conversational interfaces we’re pushing forward today will become tomorrow’s standard: voice control, eye-tracking control, natural-language project management, AI agents (OpenClaw), the most advanced LLMs on the market that understand human cognitive load… Doug is building this from his bed, driven by necessity and an unbreakable creative spirit, and I’m doing everything I can to make sure he can stay a fully capable partner in the company for as long as possible.
Love you, Doug.