Notes from building things, mostly about the difference between what a system is supposed to do and what it does.
Comics — a comic book generator that runs at home
A story idea and a few reference photos go in; a lettered, multi-page book comes out. A language model writes the script, a diffusion model paints the panels, and a Python director decides what each is allowed to do. Everything runs on machines in the house.
- A comic book generator that runs entirely at home
- The comic journey: from a node graph that shredded its own script to a printed book the family read
Ember — a chat bot for the house
Ember is the family’s chat companion: a Matrix bot with a language model for a brain, her own cards for scores, weather and news, and a small set of lanes behind her that propose, build and deploy code. These posts are about the parts of her that broke in interesting ways.
- A chat bot that routes, and answers where asked
- The Ember journey: from a chat bot with a brain to the one queue the house works from
Knowledge — two vaults, a gate, and a search that answers with links
How a household of agents remembers what it did. One vault the AI rewrites, one vault people read that is never rewritten, a publish gate that lets nothing out by default, and a search over all of it. These posts are about keeping the written record ahead of the system it describes.
Research
Comparisons written to settle a decision — the candidates laid out against the requirements that prompted the question, and what the evidence actually supports.
The estate — running a house of servers
A dozen services on a few boxes at home, one small box outside, and the monitoring that watches them. These posts are about what an outside checker can and cannot see.
- A house of servers that can explain itself
- Monitoring a house the internet cannot reach
- The estate journey: from files that lived in one place to a house that is rebuilt from code
The forge — one drawing to a rigged character
The model forge turns one reference drawing into painted views, a mesh, a rig and a game-ready file, in fifteen declared steps. It also paints Ember’s own portraits. These posts are about what a pipeline claims versus what it produced.
- A render pipeline for one character
- The forge, in pictures: one drawing to a character in the game
- The forge journey: from one avatar to a recipe that makes the whole cast
The RPG — a family game in two and three dimensions
A Godot game made for the kids, whose whole cast is the family, built twice: a 2D platformer-and-hub game, and a 3D re-telling of the same chapter that reads the same story data. These posts follow the game from sample level to festival, and the places where the two presentations disagreed.
- One story rendered in two and three dimensions
- From a sample level to the festival: the game in screenshots
- The game journey: from a JSON level to a village that has to read as the family