Artificial Intelligence

Painting of Narcissus attributed to Caravaggio: a young man in a white shirt and brocade vest leans over dark water on his hands and one knee, gazing down at his own reflection.

Seven for Seven: My Essays Pass Every Test Built from My Essays

Last summer I wrote about teaching my assistant to reach and to remember. Reach meant tools for looking at the live world; remember meant a small local database that survives between our conversations; and in both cases my part was to name what was missing while the assistant built the way to fill each gap. I closed that essay on a promise I meant: there would be another gap to name next week. This one was in how the assistant writes. The request was four sentences, sent on a Sunday afternoon. I asked the assistant to research what makes written material pleasant to read. Then it was to analyze the gap between that research and the writing skills it already had, and make a plan to fill it. That assignment carried an irony: I was asking a system that cannot feel anything about a sentence to find out what makes sentences pleasant. The answer stepped around the irony rather than through it. Much of pleasant reading turns out to be measurable. ...

Close-up of a nineteenth-century Fresnel lighthouse lens: two brass-framed panels of concentric glass rings, each a bullseye that gathers light into a beam.

A Lighthouse in Reverse: Building a Lidar Pi with an Agent

A lighthouse turns its beam so that ships can find it. The lidar on my workbench turns its beam so that it can find everything else. Ten times a second, the LD19 sweeps an infrared laser around the room and times each reflection, a method its manual calls direct time-of-flight (LD19 Manual, 2022). Paired with a Raspberry Pi 5 and a PiSugar battery board, it becomes a portable device that knows the shape of any room I set it in. My partner on the build was my AI assistant, the agent that runs on my Mac in a runtime called Hermes. I brought the parts, four wires, and a goal. The agent brought a terminal on the Pi and a habit of checking its own work. Together we went from a bare board to a working web application in a day. What came after, a month of building, taught me how a person and an agent can experiment well together. ...

The brass gears and dials of Tide Predicting Machine No. 2, a mechanical analog computer nicknamed "Old Brass Brains"

Teaching My Assistant to Reach and to Remember

For the past week or so I have been doing a peculiar kind of engineering. I have been extending an AI assistant, and I have been doing it with the assistant. Not by feeding it into an editor as a source file, but by sitting across from it, describing what it was missing, and letting it write the code that would connect the new capability back into itself. The distinction sounds like a technicality. It is not. It is most of the point, but first, the two things I set out to give it. ...