Poiesic Systems

Recently I had a need to interact with a LLM from a throwaway shell script. Initially I went the easy route of shelling out to claude -p to solve my problem. Problem solved, script done, and I moved on to my next task.

Something in my brain, nestled next to the part that loves the ideas behind the Plan 9 operating system, kept spinning on the idea. Having successfully nerd-sniped myself I did what any self-respecting programmer would do. I built a FUSE filesystem that makes interacting with large language models as easy as interacting with files.

Like everyone else I’ve been trying to understand the impact of AI on the job market. Calling the current state of things ‘murky’ is a understatement. Things are moving fast. It seems new models and products like Anthropic’s Mythos and Claude Design dramatically reshape the landscape every week or two promising more capabilities and likely more job automation. At the same time there’s polls showing bipartisan support for data center construction moratoriums. Then there’s Microsoft’s recent announcement they are pausing Copilot sign-ups for single-user plans which suggests even the hyperscalers are struggling with AI’s economics.

I’m shelving Collabchek.

It’s the right call but it still stings. Collabchek was a bet on a future where teams of human engineers needed better tools to stay coordinated as codebases and organizations grew. It’s amazing how poorly that assumption has aged.

Lately I’ve been taking some time to focus on creative hobbies. Somewhere along the way they got shoved to the margins to make way for work and life. I want to correct that. One of my favorite creative hobbies is writing fiction. For the longest time I used Scrivener but it never became second nature. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing product and works well for a lot of people. It just missed the mark for me.

So I wrote nib. I’ve used it to write a 90k word rough draft of a novel, fixing bugs and adding features as I’ve needed them. And now I’d like to share it.

Like many software engineers of my vintage (Gen X) my core influences include William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and The Matrix movie series. That’s right, cyberpunk baby. Of course, despite the hopes and dreams of a generation we didn’t get Gibsonian cyberspace. We got the web in all it’s hacky glory. Don’t get me wrong, though. The web is very cool.

It’s just not as cool as jacking in to your custom Ono-Sendai deck and hacking some Tessier-Ashpool ICE while your vat-grown ninja from the black clinics in Chiba has your back.