Making Magic (Act I)
Reverse-engineering magic to build products that twinkle with childlike wonder
We crave magic. It’s that feeling you got walking down the stairs on Christmas morning to see Santa’s presents sitting under the tree. That feeling you got tasting mom’s home-cooked meals after a long time away. Watching colorful bursts of fireworks light up the night sky. Magic comes in many forms, and makes us feel like a child again.
Magic was greatest when we were children, when everything was a “first”, these magical moments were inevitable. Our first sunset, first kiss, first love, first taste of college freedom, magic was seemingly a continuous part of our lives. As we grew up, these “firsts” were harder to find, and slowly the magic around us began to fade. Our inner magic bar for what we considered “magical” became much higher. These cravings are astronomically high, but we’re starving with critically low supply.
Today, we’re chasing this elusive “magic” and trying to reproduce this experience into the very products we build. After working with startups, scaled companies, and my own ideas, I now believe magic can be systematically reverse-engineered by understanding inputs, outputs, and processes between them. Spoiler: It’s obviously hard, there’s no silver bullet, and I’m still testing these mental models in the real-world.
Now let’s make some magic.
The Prestige
There’s one common signature of magic — reverting back to a state of childlike wonder. This is the essence of magic.
Magic isn’t made by just turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. The audience wouldn’t find this by itself compelling. It’s the last act, “The Prestige”, that really makes magic matter. The magician lets you in on a little secret, they tell you what’s coming, and then actually make it happen. But making it isn’t enough. You need to make the audience a part of the magical act itself. You need to make them experience the magic in a unique way for them to care.
“The Prestige”, the main ingredient of the magical act, is reflected in a promise. A promise wouldn’t matter unless it’s kept. But keeping it isn’t enough. The way in which you keep it, the lasting effect, is what actually matters. When you’re getting married, you make vows to your partner to be there “in sickness and health, for better, or worse, until death do us part''. Sure, these promises would mean nothing if they weren’t kept, but do you begrudgingly hold the promise or lovingly let it unfold? It’s easy to say, “I promise to always be there for you”. Much harder to keep while cancer ravages their body. Much, much harder to do it with a steadfast spirit.
A prophecy wouldn’t matter unless it’s fulfilled. Last year I met a man who sat right next to me on a Washington Square Park bench, proclaiming he was a prophet of the end times, and 2023 was our judgment year. Of course, he was wrong, and his prophecy never came to pass. He never made it to “The Turn”.
Jesus prophesied about himself in Mark 9:31 (NIV): “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise”. Were He to simply die and not come back from the dead, had the prophecy not been fulfilled, none of it would matter and there would be no meaning. Christianity would never have been born. His prophecy came true, but fulfillment alone isn’t enough. It’s the way in which the resurrection came to pass that holds meaning. Jesus was crucified, a form of torturous Roman execution designed to not only kill but also humiliate. He was nailed to a cross, suspended by exhausted arms and lungs pressured by a constrained ribcage — slowly, painfully, publicly dying a death He didn’t deserve. He forgave those who crucified Him in Luke 23:34 (NIV): “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”, and modeled a profound act of love and redemption, through the immense depth of suffering and sacrifice.
Paraphrasing René Girard, an influential French historian, philosopher, and Christian theologian; in the end, Jesus died a sinless, sacrificial scapegoat. He then transcended death itself like a Phoenix rising from the ashes of the grave, ultimately revealing God’s power over life and vindication of His innocence. Jesus did many miracles and fulfilled many extraordinary prophecies, but the final act of death and resurrection, the way in which it happened, and the childlike wonder it created, is the sacred magic of Christianity. It could only be made possible through this powerful prestige moment.
The Magic of ChatGPT
“The Prestige'', the effect of fulfillment, is what’s so hard to produce. Many can proclaim something, fewer can turn it into reality, even fewer can actually cut through the noise to make us feel that reality. OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, showcased a masterclass in delivering the prestige moment. GPT-3 existed a whole 2.5 years before v1 of ChatGPT was ever released to the public. The model was pure magic, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. No other “AI” bot could be considered “intelligent”, only “artificial”, after seeing this in action, but most people (myself included) thought we were years away from anything this paradigm-altering. OpenAI was slowly, methodically building up to their era-defining prestige moment in three acts. What a magic trick!
Act I: “The Pledge”
OpenAI was founded in 2015 by a small group of researchers dedicated to building artificial general intelligence (AGI) in a safe and purposeful way. They used standard ML techniques, massive datasets and iterated on optimizing LLM transformer architecture producing many important research papers in the process, including the paper that introduced the GPT architecture, a precursor to many of today’s transformer-based models. The paper outlined novel pre-training strategies using language modeling objectives which were fine-tuned for specific tasks. But even this original GPT-architecture-defining paper was rejected from a major ML conference, the International Conference on Learning Representations, for not being groundbreaking enough. Even the insiders found the findings relatively “ordinary”, but the concepts introduced in the original paper paved the way for more advanced models like GPT-2 and GPT-3.
Act II: “The Turn”
For an AGI-building-company, OpenAI’s target audience was everyone, and they needed more than a small set of engineers, researchers, and early adopters to know what they were creating. They entered their second act by launching GPT-3 publicly and developing GPT-3.5 internally, continuously iterating on what seemed “ordinary” even to many insiders, and created the world’s only state-of-the-art 175B parameter model with summarization and classification abilities that began transforming our perceptions of what AI was capable of. Compared to GPT-2, this new version actually gave coherent, contextually relevant, and more human-like responses, and developers could actually play with it through an API. There were now sparks of magic, but it still wasn’t enough.
These models were hard to interact with and weren’t designed as conversational partners, leaving the original promise of the prior era of chatbots, still unfulfilled. Querying an API or asking questions in an API playground wasn’t easily accessible for most. There wasn’t any capability to build on conversations back and forth, just a single text box for one prompt at a time. There needed to be something more for people to experience the magic in an easy, approachable way. I mean, do you have any idea what mode, engine, temperature, stop sequences, Top P, or frequency penalty mean? I definitely didn’t and I write software. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. Very few users would even have the time or attention to learn a system like this. What OpenAI needed was an interface that abstracted all this complexity away, to help people experience the magic.
Act III: “The Prestige”
On November 30, 2022, the world changed completely… forever. OpenAI released ChatGPT as a research experiment to get user feedback and understand real-world limitations. In just 5 days it reached 1M users and quickly became the fastest growing app of all-time. It now has 180M+ users worldwide and has become the face of the AI revolution.
For the first time ever, we saw a world where Googling wasn’t the fastest way to get an answer, it was ChatGPT(ing?). Instead of a librarian helping you find the book, having to read the book and come to a conclusion yourself, we now had a digital librarian who gave upfront answers that already consumed every book for you. This was way better than the blue links we were stuck with for years with Google. A conversational chatbot UI was just what OpenAI needed for the entire world to really get a sense of the magic. Non-“insiders” could now ask the model questions and instantly get answers like a string of consciousness, like someone on the other end was actually typing the answer for you. The AI felt like a human presence that could shoot back sarcastic jokes or poetic Shakespearean-esque ensembles, which created the “WOW” moments that had people running to tell their friends about it. This was, as Alex Schultz calls it, the magic moment. This was the moment that people finally said, “I get it”. This was magic.
Magic occurs from a suspension of reality in our childlike wonder. Sometimes it lasts for just a brief moment like after a magic trick. Other times it exists as the world settles into a new reality. As we’ve grown accustomed to ChatGPT and the 1T parameter GPT-4, magic has now faded and AI has become our new standard for reality. We now use it to help us answer homework questions, write docs for work, build websites, suggest cooking recipes, learn about things we’re curious about, and so much more in between. Our reality suspension has lifted, the bar has grown, and we’re back to a new cycle. I’m sure GPT-5 will blow all of our minds in some micro-magical ways, but the macro-magic moment has passed. It took 7 years for OpenAI to go from Act I to III, and the magic bar is now much higher in this new Act I. I can’t wait for their next Act III.
Know Vibes, Then Build
The secret, the product, the experience — the creation, impresses no one. Magical product experiences are captured through emotion. You might call this emotional climate a vibe, aura, or spirit. Reverse-engineering magic starts by working backwards from a single spiking vibe, to co-create with your audience, that leads to childlike wonder.
If you understand what you’re capturing, creating becomes much clearer.
No one knows this better than Disney, the masters of capturing magic. They capture the magic of bliss. Everything they do, from Disney theme parks to Pixar movie productions, is purposefully designed to bring children and parents an overwhelming sense of happiness in a state of childlike wonder. They know their audience so well they’ve distilled everything down to a single spiking vibe that orbits everything they do. Immersive storytelling and exacting execution standards are a byproduct of such clarity. The magic of Disney World, the “Happiest Place on Earth”, is no coincidence. Hugging Mickey Mouse, being twirled around on Space Mountain, half-terrified, half-exhilarated, parading through the vibrant streets of Magic Kingdom, vanilla-ice-cream-cone in my little kid hands, are all still etched in my mind. If there’s ever really any moat in business, this is it — magical product experiences are defined by powerful prestige moments that create these spiking vibes.
My Brooklyn halal street cart vendor, the guy on the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic, might just be the best product magician I’ve ever met. He’s turned halal food, a common staple of the New Yorker diet, into something magical. I’m transported back to when I was 12, downing chunks of chicken over rice with my friend Mo, the Egyptian spices blending in yummy delight. Every week he’d greet me with a big smile and a “HABIBI!!!” you could feel radiating from the heart. His lovingly made, perfected, precisely flavored shawarma, warm presence, and little tales of his adventurous 4 year old, captured the magic of affection. He knew exactly what his target audience wanted from him, treated me like part of his family, and worked backwards from what that meant to me. Everything he did radiated from spiking on a single vibe. His cart was right in the path of my daily commute, but to be honest, even if he were a 30 minute detour away, I’m confident I’d still go see him every single time.
Linear, the heartthrob of Silicon Valley startups, captures the magic of conviction. Their entire ethos revolves around crafting strongly opinionated, professional grade software. In lieu of novelty, they’ve created magic through sheer excellence. They have a whole webpage that reads like a love letter to builders, recounting a “story about magic” and the tagline on their jobs site is “Software has lost its magic. We want your help to bring it back.” They write, “Today, software is everywhere. But truly great software has become incredibly rare. Computers are faster, but apps work slower. Craftsmanship has been replaced with growth hacks. Visionary product ideas turned into incremental changes.” As a software builder, I can absolutely feel their conviction, and I love it. Their founders write highly opinionated pieces on “Rethinking the startup MVP”, talking about how “Today's Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is often about building a better version of an idea, not validating a novel one. It’s not good enough to be first with an idea. You have to out-execute from day 1.” As software that helps build more software, they know their audience of founders and builders want a battle-hardened, flawless product that inspires them to build experiences that twinkle with magic. I’m starstruck.
Steve Jobs, of course, profoundly understood the prestige moment and this importance of working backwards from a spiking vibe. At WWDC 1997, responding to a developer’s quip, he famously said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to sell it”. Apple embodies this culture in everything they create, by using technology as an enabler to make us feel their obsessive craftsmanship. The Apple Vision Pro is a testament to this obsessive craft. A single three-dimensionally formed piece of laminated glass covering a custom-built aluminum alloy frame, housing 23M pixels, beams images straight into your eyes within 12 milliseconds, virtually lag-free and real-time. Every knob, textile, sensor, every tiny detail is made with obsession. And it’s only going to get more obsessive. Apple captures the magic of obsession.
I feel like we’re starting to lose sight of intentionally capturing magic, especially with AI feeling so inherently magical, software builders are so focused on the entire magic residing within the AI model with no actual prestige moment to back it up. No one cares about the code or the model. Chase a reaction before building a solution. Ask yourself, “what emotion should I capture to produce childlike wonder?”. The more specific we are, the more we can uniquely capture. Stop creating emotionless technology, start capturing childlike wonder. Know vibes, then build.
The Transported Man
The greatest irony is that making magic doesn’t actually come from the making, but the method of presentation and following effect. I’m not advocating for vain showmanship, but simply highlighting how important the prestige moment really is. Christopher Nolan’s film, The Prestige, tells the tale of two magicians feuding over the “perfect” magic trick they call “The Transported Man”. Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) enters a wardrobe and instantly transports himself across the stage. The trick is amazing, but the showmanship is lacking. Perhaps in an ideal world the trick itself should be magical, but in the real world, the prestige moment is too weak for magic to appear. His rival magician, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), does the exact same trick, with more hype (and electricity) and receives a roaring ovation. All else equal, the method of presentation trumps all.
My version of “The Transported Man”, where I first learned to reverse-engineer magic, was back in high school. I played viola in the American Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, a world-class orchestral training ground. My peers were brilliant young musicians, many of whom went onto elite musical programs like Juilliard and Curtis. I sat in the front row, right next to the conductor, proudly wearing my title, “Assistant Principal (1st Stand, 2nd Chair)”. This came with the heavy responsibility to lead my section in creating unified orchestral magic in our rendition of the La Strada by Nino Rota, a full 30 minute orchestral suite from the ballet… without the slightest clue of what magic really meant.
My Principal, Katja, played the piece differently somehow. She sang and I trembled, even though we both played the exact same notes right on cue. I must have practiced the piece a hundred times, to the point I had memorized every single beat, but it never felt quite right, definitely not like Katja. Our conductor, Mr. Spalding, noticed, pulled me aside, and told me to “just sink into the music, feel everyone around you, and play with control”. So I tried sinking, and I sank for a while. His words kept ringing and eventually I just closed my eyes and soaked it all in. I stopped caring about the notes and started playing with emotion the piece demanded. I sat a bit taller, shoulders more relaxed. Every crescendo came with a new roaring energy, vibrato more graceful, fingers delicately dancing across the fingerboard. I was finally tapping into an emotion, a spiking vibe, that I desperately needed to help spellbind the audience. This was when I first learned to create magic. It was when I first understood the meaning of the prestige moment. Since then my magic bar has steadily risen, but I try to keep tapping into the sound around me and playing with the emotion my products deserve.
Intent matters. Emotion matters. Presentation matters. Start with the emotion, fulfill your third act, and your products will sing.
You’ll make magic.
As a product developer myself, I really like this essay! I always wondered how to build a magical moment. But it always get lost in the technical details. Looking at it from a different lens helped a ton!
Congrats Vijay. This piece is awesome.