Building AI powered tools to augment human creativity and problem solving. Previously @GitHub and @Google 🇨🇦

San Francisco
Joined April 2007
I've been thinking about why verifying AI agent output feels so much harder than writing the spec that produced it. That question led me to rethink where my attention actually belongs in the process, and eventually to build atelier.dev narphorium.com/blog/decision…
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Shawn Simister retweeted
I modeled this after emacs (my favorite program of all time). The UI / parts of the sequencer are written in (a custom) LISP and can be hacked and extended without restarting the app.
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happy birthday to skills, they turn 1 today 🎂 feels like a lot more
Today we're introducing Skills in claude dot ai, Claude Code, and the API. Skills let you package specialized knowledge into reusable capabilities that Claude loads on demand as agents tackle more complex tasks. Here's how they work and why they matter for the future of agents:
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You Can See Everything is really good. I'm still trying to make sense of it
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More DAGs should be drawn this way. In a pipeline like the one below, the nodes form a list, so each node can be a table row with metadata beside it. Parallel branches are the main limit, but horizontal space is cheap!
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We shouldn’t be automating away user intent. If the agent can predict what to do next it should just do it.
Now in beta: composer predictions in Codex for Pro users. Codex can now suggest your next message based on your conversation and how you talk to it. One of the most loved new features we've ever tested internally.
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Breaking apart a book
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we need ways to make it clear what is… - explicitly specified - hinted at - an agent assumption any amount of the above is fine, but once code is in the codebase there’s no way to tease out what’s what
we've mostly gotten past the slop issue in this new world of working together with AI the next problem is people keep accidentally undoing functionality this is happening because everyone is more in everyone else's business. hit an issue? fix it right away without nagging anyone the problem is it's unclear how intentional the current behavior is and what absolutely should not be rolled back you can say tests should be this. but they don't capture the fact that you discarded seemingly valid solutions 1-4 and settled on 5. someone later (an agent) might thing "oh 3 is simpler" any additional document also doesn't feel like it solves the problem because it's yet another thing that can drift where is the source of truth for how your software is supposed to work?
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an early experiment for Live Ink, a new feature coming to Vignette. annotate anything, anywhere -- and your agents can do the same. obviously need to incorporate voice input, too. i mean come on.
i frequently use the MacOS screenshot and annotation tools with my agents. this works well enough. the built-in annotations are a huge pain, though. very clunky. i've tried other tools in the space and they're usually feature bloated and aren't tailored to my particular needs. so, as one does nowadays, i built my own tool, Vignette. my goal was to keep the best parts of Apple's native tools, while enhancing and streamlining them for modern agent workflows. it's free, open source, and very customizable. oh, and agents can send you their own annotated screenshots. this has unlocked some surprisingly effective collaborative moments! more to come here. vignette.pete.design
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We built a nice free tool at @k_dense_ai on top of Jev from @typesafeai called Citation Telephone which follows a cited claim back through the papers it cites, reads each one, and shows where the claim came from and what changed on the way. k-dense.ai/blog/introducing-…
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recommended reading, though i still disagree, as explained on @syntaxfm early this year. for code, both memory and docs are not efficient. your codebase is all you need. make it modular, make modules small, at most, have a little maintained map of where what is. liao.gg/blog/agents-dont-nee…
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Shawn Simister retweeted
For years, maybe a decade, I've wanted to build a writing tool that just did a few things I couldn't find anywhere else. A system that mimicked how I think when I write. A system that provided clear affordances, features, and places to do the things I wanted to do. A way to play with my writing as I'm writing it. A way to settle into just the right way to say something. It never made sense to make it a 37signals product because it's not commercially viable, nor would it be worth pulling people off their other work to hack on this. Plus, it would have taken months the old way. So this weekend I just made it myself, with Claude's help. It's called Write_On and the short video walks you through it. Essentially it's "alternative control" at the word, sentence, and paragraph level, plus a way to dim stuff back, and stash stuff near by. Not version control, but alternative control. You'll see what I mean when you watch the video below. So here it is. Write_On.
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Shawn Simister retweeted
I built a living town with Opus. It references "A Pattern Language" for the design. You can toggle architectural details to get a feel for them :)
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you know where in-the-moment, "system 1" type ai decision-making could be cool? music technology. jevseq is a demented multiplayer drum sequencer. you paint the world, jev walks it in real time, and tries its hardest to hit a snare on 2 and 4.
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Got 250M free tokens from Drex, a new Jev competitor. First impressions: Pros: fast model (13 ms server time), ~3× cheaper on my short requests, same API Cons: slower round trips for me (166 vs 128 ms), prompt-sensitive: even after reworking my prompts it trailed Jev (81% vs 93%)
Introducing Drex - a lightning-fast decision model built to rival Jev. #1 on the Decision Index. (official scores tbd) winning 23 out of 40 benchmarks Architecture: Small Diffusion Model with RLAF Price: $0.04 per 1M input tokens (cheaper than Jev) Latency: less than a second. Sign up now for 250M welcome credits. nace.ai/drex Open weights and the full tech report are coming very soon. 👀 🦖 #jev #nace #drex
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efficiency, productivity, speed we keep worshipping these words like they are what we live for ship faster merge more manage more agents compress every loop remove every pause turn every hour into output but what is the point of endless production if there is no time left to think deeply? not react not optimize not summarize not clear the queue think to sit with a question long enough that your real intention starts to appear to find the purpose underneath the motion to ask whether the thing being accelerated should exist at all ai could be a new canvas a way to make strange things personal things impossible things tools, worlds, poems, games, interfaces, films, languages, rituals things that let more people touch the shape of their own imagination but instead, so much of it is becoming slop factories more content more funnels more tickets more fake work pretending to be value you can merge 2000 prs you can manage 500 agents you can wake up to dashboards proving that the machine kept moving while you slept but what is the point if you only sleep 5 hours a day? what is the point if you stop talking to other humans? stop learning about the past? stop playing? stop wandering? stop being surprised? what is the point if your whole life becomes optimizing the system that is consuming you? speed is not meaning scale is not wisdom automation is not freedom if it only makes everyone run faster and where are we running? toward what? a world where every person becomes a manager of machines, and every machine produces more things no one had the time to truly want? the danger is not that ai makes us lazy the danger is that ai makes us endlessly busy that it gives us infinite production before we have found intention infinite execution before we have developed taste infinite motion before we have learned how to be still maybe the real frontier is not more speed maybe it is discernment knowing what not to make knowing when to stop knowing when the most productive thing is to sleep, read history, call a friend, play with a cat, walk without tracking it, or stare at the ceiling until the false urgency dissolves tools should give us more life not turn life into a tool if ai is going to matter, it should not just help us produce more it should help us become more human more imaginative more free otherwise, it’s the same old factory just without humans
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Can Jev emulate a CPU?
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Jev can't reason. So I built an interpreter that reasons for it. It runs a logic language where the facts and rules are plain English.
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Found the post which inspired me to build this UI xitter.cf/geoffreylitt/status/18…
was working on a prolog interpreter this week step 1: had Claude make me a custom debugger UI that could visualize execution traces of my interpreter! AI-generated custom dev tools ftw 😎
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In 1956, Cybernetics was renamed "AI" by logic programming experts. Now Trump wants to rename AI again. Let's revive the old name! Modern AI is about neural nets & deep learning, closer to Cybernetics than to 1956 AI. Plus, Cybernetics sounds better than Artificial Intelligence.
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