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Breadboard and Opal
Just over two years ago, I landed the first commit in a fresh Github repo and started the Breadboard project. The innocuous “Here is a graph” title of that commit already pointed to where I wanted to go – a…
Machine Thinking
I’ll begin with an overly simplistic metaphor. Let’s visualize a ball rolling down a shallow slope. Driven by gravity, it’s seeking the easiest path down. Except the slope is full of ridges, channels, and nubs, and they make the ball…
Recipes for Thought
I’d like to present to you a distinction: two different approaches I take when using large language models (LLMs). I’ll call these two approaches “chat” and “recipe”.
Teaching AI to write lyrics
I have been on a bit of a kick to get the large language models (LLMs) to generate interesting lyrics for songs. Over time, it’s become quite an adventure, a fun exploration of LLM capabilities. Here’s the multi-part account of…
Jamming with Udio
Today, I had my first jam session with Udio. With the introduction of audio prompting, I am now able to use my own sound as the starting point for a generated track. This seems like a leap forward, despite the…
Casino Creativity
I’ve been geeking out on AI-generated music services Suno and Udio, and it’s been super-interesting to see them iterate and ship quickly. It looks like there might be a value niche in this particular neck of the woods in the…
Chrysalis
A moment of clarity I suspect it’s playing a game I reach out, and it’s gone My unreality By a different name Is what yet to be drawn.
The third option
I facilitated a workshop on systems thinking recently (or “lensical thinking” as I’ve come to call it). The purpose of the lensical thinking workshop is to provide a coherent set of tools for approaching problems of particularly unsolvable kind, using…
Flexibility of the medium
I did this fun little experiment recently. I took my two last posts (Thinking to Write and The Bootstrapping Phase) and asked an LLM to turn them into lyrics. Then, after massaging the lyrics a bit, to better fit with…
The Bootstrapping Phase
I think I have a slightly better way of describing a particular moment in a product’s life that I alluded to in Rock tumbler teams, Chances to get it right, and later, Build a thing to build the thing. I…
Thinking to write
I’ve had this realization about myself recently, and it’s been rather useful in gaining a bit more understanding about how my mind works. I am writing it down in hopes it would help you in your own self-reflections.
Aircraft Carriers and Zodiac Boats
An insightful conversation with a colleague inspired me to articulate the distinction between velocity and agility – and all that implies. When I talked about velocity in the past, I sort of elided the fact that agility, or the ability…
AI Baklava
At its core, the process of layering resolves two counterposed forces. Both originate from the need for predictability in behavior. One from below, where the means are concrete, but the aims are abstract – and one from above, where the…
Reinventing Organizations Redux
This one is a bit out there, if only to connect some dots and shake loose new insights. Let’s get that distant look in our eyes and contemplate a possibility that may or may not transpire. Let’s all suppose that…
The Breadboard developer cycle
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working on a bunch of new things in the Breadboard project, mostly situated around developer ergonomics. I’ve mentioned creating AI recipes a bunch in the past, and it might be a good…
Declarative vs. imperative
I recently had a really fun conversation with a colleague about “declarative vs. imperative” programming paradigms, and here’s a somewhat rambling riff that I captured here as a result.
Hourglass model and Breadboard
Architecturally, Breadboard aspires to have an hourglass shape to its stack. As Bernhard Seefeld points out, this architecture is fairly common in compilers, and other NLP tools, so we borrowed it for Breadboard as well.
The protocol force
Here’s a riff on the “hourglass model” conversation I’ve had with Bernhard Seefeld a while back. I only recently connected it with my earlier mumblings about software layering, and here’s what came out.
Why AI orchestration
Why do I find the problem of AI patterns and more generally, AI orchestration so interesting that I literally started building a framework for it? Why do we even need graphs and chains in this whole AI thing? My colleagues…
Makers and Magicians
I want to finally connect two threads of the story I’ve been slowly building across several posts. I’ve talked about the rise of makers. I’ve talked about the magicians. It’s time to bring them together and see how they relate…