EP 064 · 94 MIN CLAUDE CODE: ADHD'S WORST NIGHTMARE

Midjourney V8 First Impressions + Claude Code Breakthroughs

March 29, 202694 min Rory Flynn & Drew Brucker

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The short version

Drew Brucker and Rory Flynn give their first hands-on verdict on Midjourney's alpha-stage V8: more coherent than V7, but volatile, with stacked mood boards reliably failing and no edit model yet. The back half turns into a Claude Code show-and-tell covering Rory's skill-and-orchestrator pipeline, Chrome extensions, and Drew's "ghost system" for de-AI-ifying his writing, plus a one-day Calendly replacement.

Key takeaways

01
V8's standard model with no personalization looks sharper than V7, but stacking two mood boards together reliably fails to generate.
02
Stylize feels compressed now: Drew and Rory could barely see a difference between 150 and 900 in side-by-side mood-board tests.
03
Structured, camera-and-lighting-specific prompting may now beat "short and vibey" — V8's coherence rewards detail more than V7 did.
04
Rory won't hack around a missing edit model again: one-click, multi-image consistency agents elsewhere make workaround theater a waste of time.
05
Audit, don't hoard, your Claude skills: Drew has Claude score each one 0-10 against alternatives and rebuilds anything that doesn't hit 10.
06
Ask the model how it wants data structured before feeding it a spreadsheet — Claude told Rory it preferred tagged Notion sub-pages.
07
Drew saved $144/year building his own Calendly replacement ("Perch") in a day, API auth included, and can patch bugs himself in minutes.

Receipts · said on the record

“I'm disappointed. And I think it's OK to say this. I love mid-journey, always will, no matter what.”

Drew Brucker First reaction to Midjourney V8 launching only on an alpha site

“That's what I've been noticing with mood boards specifically. I should say that is that the mood boards seem a little bit unstable. That might be something that they're ironing out.”

Rory Flynn V8 mood board behavior during live testing

“When you give me the edit model, then I'll tell you how bullish I am about kind of like what's going on here too … you kind of need an edit model for most of this stuff.”

Drew Brucker Why the missing edit model is the real dealbreaker for V8

“It's just the reality is like time's compressing. You've got all these tools now. It's just the workflows are changing. People are exhausted. I mean, you don't want to have to figure that stuff out at this point in the game.”

Drew Brucker Why neither host wants to hack around broken mood boards anymore

“Claude code is the best and worst thing that's ever happened to me … It's ADHD worst nightmare.”

Rory Flynn Rory's relationship with Claude Code

“I'm calling it the ghost system. So it's basically like a writing operating system, because I'm tired of the AI writing and people don't even know but they're still publishing stuff.”

Drew Brucker Drew's Claude-built system for de-AI-ifying his writing

Chapters

Questions this episode answers

What did Fast Hours think of Midjourney V8's first impressions?

Drew and Rory found V8's alpha-site launch disappointing, with early generation failures and unstable mood boards, but they note the standard model looks sharper than V7 and coherence has genuinely improved. Both say the still-missing edit model is the real deciding factor.

Can you combine multiple mood boards in Midjourney V8?

Not reliably as of this episode. Both hosts hit repeated failed generations when stacking two mood boards, or pairing a mood board with a style reference, during live testing.

What is Drew Brucker's "ghost system"?

Drew's term for a personal writing operating system built in Claude Code that fights generic-sounding AI writing using roughly 22 layered voice profiles, a library of named patterns, and a pre-flight audit checklist before he publishes.

How does Rory Flynn organize his Claude Code skills?

Rory keeps a pool of abstracted, reusable "skills" plus an orchestrator agent that reads a project brief and assembles the right ones, which he compares to a general contractor calling in subcontractors for a job.

Is Midjourney V8 out of alpha?

No. As of this episode V8 is only available on an alpha site, which Drew says was a letdown given V7 shipped in April 2025 and this release came almost a year later.

Show notes

Drew and Rory crawl back from travel chaos, token addiction, and mild creative delusion to answer the question everyone’s been asking: did Midjourney V8 finally land... and was it worth the wait?

In this episode, they break down their real first impressions of Midjourney V8, including what feels better, what feels busted, why mood boards are suddenly acting possessed, and why the old “short and vibey” prompting style may have quietly lost its crown. They get into coherence, SV6 vs. SV7 behavior, stylize weirdness, failed generations, the alpha-site disappointment, and the one thing that actually matters now: whether Midjourney can ship a truly usable edit model before everyone wanders off to easier tools.

Then the conversation mutates into a full-blown Claude Code spiral. Drew and Rory unpack the Chrome extensions, internal skills, markdown systems, Notion setups, custom workflows, and tiny automations they’re building at an alarming pace. There’s talk of AI writing detection, reusable agent pipelines, presentation hacks, Pinterest utilities, GitHub repos, and the growing suspicion that the real side effect of Claude Code is not productivity. It is total psychic collapse with excellent output.

If you care about Midjourney V8, Claude Code, mood boards, AI image generation, prompt structure, creative workflows, Chrome extensions, automation systems, or what happens when two visual AI nerds disappear for a few weeks and come back with opinions, this one’s for you.

⏱️ Fast Hour 00:00 - Midjourney V8 finally lands 01:25 - Rory’s travel chaos and failed gens 05:06 - First impressions and alpha letdown 11:30 - V8 coherence and vibey prompts 13:30 - SV6 vs SV7 mood board test 21:44 - Mood board degradation gets real 25:56 - V8 looks better, but fails too often 33:04 - Structured prompting may matter more 35:29 - Q4, HD, and stylize confusion 39:09 - The real missing piece: edit model 43:45 - Why nobody wants workaround theater 48:04 - The strange realism hiding in V8 54:45 - Claude Code takes over their brains 58:19 - Rory’s skill stack and agent hub 01:04:15 - Drew’s “ghost system” for writing 01:07:07 - Killing Calendly with Claude 01:11:17 - Tiny tools, huge leverage 01:17:13 - Ask the model how it wants data 01:26:31 - Billboard shout-out 01:32:32 - Wrap-up, RIP Sora, subscribe

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