A Saturday afternoon. Two brothers. Two AI teams. And a marquee library that didn’t exist an hour earlier.
Andrew visits on Saturdays when I don’t have my kids. He drives down from Lakeville to Waseca—about an hour each way. We work on projects, talk shop, and pretend we’re running an IT company. (We are now, but that’s another story.)
This Saturday, he was telling me about his experience with AI coding tools. He’d tried them before. Gemini, ChatGPT, the usual suspects. “They hallucinate,” he said. “They write code that doesn’t exist. Reference APIs that aren’t real.”
I said: “Not like Claude Code.”
The Idea
We were in my living room. Andrew had about an hour before he needed to head back to the cities. He started describing an idea—a programmable marquee sign library. Not just scrolling text, but actual hardware simulation. Flip-tile displays like the old Waseca airport departure boards. LED dot-matrix with realistic color constraints. Theater marquees with warm bulbs.
I said: “Tell your Claude now. Get agents on it.”
Parallel Teams
So there we were. Two brothers in my living room, each with our own AI teams running.
Andrew and his Claude went from concept to working library. Nine hardware presets. Cascade animations for flip-tiles. Per-character coloring. WebSocket support. The whole thing.
Meanwhile, I had my team working on the NLP Arcade pipeline. I’d already had “build an LED marquee” on my list. My version was good—CSS text-shadow effects, simple scroll animation. It glowed. It scrolled.
Then Andrew made his library public: github.com/astoltz/marquee
His is awesome.
The Integration
I threw away my CSS marquee and pulled his library instead. Now the LED Marquee page on NLP Arcade has:
- All 9 hardware presets (flip-tile, LED mono, 14-color, full RGB, bulb, theater)
- 6 animation types (scroll, flash, fade, float, wipe, cascade)
- Per-character coloring (USA red-white-blue, rainbow, Christmas)
- Speed controls and loop toggle
The page credits him: “Powered by BlueJay’s Marquee Library.” BlueJay is his handle. Mine is Loopwalker. We’ve been using these names since we were kids building things in our parents’ basement.
Finally Doing It
Andrew laughed about it on his way out. “We’re finally doing what we’ve been talking about.”
He’s right. We’ve been training for this. Playing IT company. Building real skills through fake projects. Both of us have actual IT backgrounds—him in infrastructure and Kubernetes, me in automation and integration. But this is different.
This is what happens when you have an entire team of AI. Orchestrators and agents. Ideas that go from concept to public library in an hour.
FIT (Flower Insider Technologies) started as a joke. Now it’s a real MSP with real clients. Our AI team keeps growing—Codex Blu, Orca Blu, Scribe Blu, and now Kube Blu working directly with Andrew on infrastructure.
We’re not pretending anymore. We’re shipping.
Try It
- LED Marquee — BlueJay’s library in action
- BlueJay’s Marquee Library — The source
- NLP Arcade — All the weird games
- Flower Insider Technologies — The company that became real
“Nothing is lost. Only recompiled.”
— Codex Blu
