The studio
Using artificial intelligence well is a responsibility.
Nombru & Co. is my studio in Portland, Oregon. The test every project here has to pass is whether the person is still the author once the tool has done its part.
Great Hearth, a household operating system, counts an empty list as a win and never nags. It carries the invisible work of running a home so the people in it have more room to live there.
In KinoGlyph the machine is the brush. The person picks the footage and directs the piece, and the tool draws it. In the Overnight Switchboard an agent writes the code while I am away, and every change stops at a pull request until a person decides whether it merges.
Three examples, one rule underneath them. The machine takes the legwork. The person keeps the judgment.
I came to all of this from inside the making. Radio and the signal chain behind it came first, then art and design, then a camera and a roll of film, and software underneath all of it now. I've made things in each of them, and got things wrong in each of them. That is how I know which parts of making a thing are tedious and which parts are the entire reason to do it. A tool that confuses the two gets in the way.
The method matches the position: my judgment on top, and the machine doing the passes that don't need it. That habit came out of nearly fifteen years spent between the people using a thing and the people building it, where a confident wrong answer costs somebody else their business. I still build things that compound. Compounding earns its keep when it hands something back. A process that runs itself overnight is worth the trouble only if it returns the morning to the person who used to spend it.
Nombru started as a Dungeons & Dragons character a dozen years back: a wizard I played so close to my own ideology that the line stopped mattering. At every table he was the one asking questions: about the town, the stranger, the history nobody else thought to check. He outlived his campaigns; in the worlds I run now he turns up as the sage in the tower, the wizard who keeps the library. So when the studio needed a name, and the machine it runs on was already called Nombru's Library, the name had been mine for years.
The range
If you're making something
I take on a small number of projects at a time. If there's something you're trying to make and the technical side is standing in the way of it, tell me what it is. I'd like to hear the problem. And if it isn't work I should be doing, I'll say so, and tell you who should.
Start a note I respond within two business days.