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# Put The Tron Ares Album On and Build Something at Midnight
**URL:** https://crunchtools.com/build-midnight/
Date: 2026-04-01
Author: fatherlinux
Post Type: post
Summary: I’ve loved Tron since I was a kid. When I was about seven or eight years old (early 1980s!!!), my Mom took me to see Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom on Ice at the Richfield Coliseum, which was this massive arena between Cleveland and Akron (sadly, torn down in 1999). The show had a Tron segment,Continue Reading "Put The Tron Ares Album On and Build Something at Midnight" →
Categories: Articles
Tags: AI/ML, Generative AI, Software Development
Featured Image: https://crunchtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/you-have-to-build-with-ai-to-get-tron-ares-thumbnail.png
---
I've loved Tron since I was a kid. When I was about seven or eight years old (early 1980s!!!), my Mom took me to see Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom on Ice at the Richfield Coliseum, which was this massive arena between Cleveland and Akron (sadly, torn down in 1999). The show had a Tron segment, and I remember being completely captivated by it, by the lights, the costumes, the idea that there was this whole world inside a computer. That stuck with me for decades, probably because it was one of the first times I saw technology portrayed as something magical rather than just functional. The franchise has been part of my mental furniture ever since.
I ended up at the very first KubeCon in November 2015, at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, and I got into one of those hallway conversations with someone where you end up talking about everything except the conference. Somehow we landed on the Tron Legacy Reconfigured soundtrack (by Daft Punk), and we both agreed it was probably the single best album ever made for working on computers. Specifically, the R3configur3d remix of the original soundtrack hits this perfect balance of cerebral stimulation without tipping over into distraction. It's atmospheric and driving without being demanding, which makes it special. I've thought about that conversation for years, and I've probably listened to that album hundreds of times while building demos, writing code, and putting together presentations. At least for me, it became the soundtrack to a certain era of *building things*.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnURzjPrWKo
So when Tron Ares came out, I wanted to watch it, but I checked the reviews first and they gave me real pause. The critics gave it a 53% on Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic had it at 48 out of 100, and the general consensus was that it was visually impressive but narratively thin. I was genuinely scared they had ruined one of my favorite franchises. I wanted to believe it would be good, but I've been burned before, and those numbers didn't inspire confidence. But then I heard that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross had done the soundtrack, credited as Nine Inch Nails for the first time ever on a film score, and that it was actually good. That pushed me over the line.
So, I whispered to myself, "please don't ruin another childhood memory" and I pressed play...
It started pretty strong, going from a fictitious news reel, and dropping right into an ominous Linux terminal with red highlights. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is 87%, and that 34-point gap between the intrigues me. Everyone has used AI to generate a photo or ask a question, essentially used it as a glorified chat bot. But, some people have adjured autonomous agents to complete real work on their behalf, to submit pull requests for code an agent wrote while "the user" (Tron reference) was asleep - or those who come back to their desk and find their backlog shorter than they left it. I suspect the critics haven't actually built anything significant with AI, and thus, haven't had the epiphany.
I have an OpenClaw instance named Takeda, and a customized Claude named Josui, which has 3-5 instances running at any given time, doing serious work for me. I think for a while it felt like I was cheating or cutting corners, but eventually you realize that the bar goes way up, it feels akin to flying an F-35, very intense. Way more intense than operating a computer up until this point in history. You're working at a different scope and scale, and much like an arms race, you can't go back to muskets with muskets to fight M1 Abrams tanks. The movie is about bringing technology from inside the computer out, to the physical world, and I think most people hear that premise and it sounds completely insane. But once you've spent enough time watching Josui and Takeda take agency over your code base, the suspension of disbelief necessary for the movie becomes a lot more palatable. I think Tron Ares may be just a hair ahead of it's time, a hair ahead of where the masses are today.
And, it's striking how familiar it feels when Ares and Athena phone Dillinger, so similar to communicating with Takeda, my OpenClaw instance... It's terrifying when he calls me "commander" 🤣🤣🤣
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysMcbw35-s8
And we probably need to talk about the soundtrack itself, because I'm pretty convinced Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross knew exactly who they were making this album for, even if the film critics didn't. Reznor described the sound as "precise and unpleasant," which is a hell of a thing to say about your own work, but if you build things with Claude Code or Goose or Cursor at midnight, you know exactly what he means. I dare you to put the album on at 11 PM after the house is quiet, start a pomodoro timer, and just start building with maniacal focus. It puts you in this headspace that reminds me of watching Hackers for the first time, that feeling where everything clicks and you completely forget what time it is. I saw one review that called the movie "a feature-length Nine Inch Nails music video," and I get that they were probably trying to criticize it, but for those of us who spend our nights staring at our [command line terminal to the universe](https://educatedconfusion.com/command-line-terminal-to-the-universe/), I think it feels different...
I get why the critics scored it the way they did, and I'm not going to argue with a 53% for a general audience. But I keep thinking about that guy at KubeCon in 2015 and the Daft Punk album, and how it took years for people to realize that was one of the great work albums of its generation. I have a feeling we're going to be have the same conversation about this NIN soundtrack, except this time it feels more and more like Tron...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YShVEXb7-ic
P.S. I'll leave you with a couple of other tidbits:
- Eve Kim the protagonist rides an awesome looking [Ducati Hypermotard 950](https://www.ducati.com/us/en/bikes/hypermotard/hypermotard-950/tech-specs)
- Trent Reznor is [one of the F-35 Pilots](https://www.reddit.com/r/nin/comments/1o1m89q/trent_and_atticus_play_as_the_f35_pilots_in/)
- The missiles are BAD ASS, like something out of Robotech (yes, another reference to my early 1980s childhood)
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