Writing

Notes from the production layer. page 2

Technical notes, experiments and post-mortems from applied AI, automation and digital product systems. Each one starts with the same question: what actually happened when the system had to produce an outcome?

22 July 2026 Materials Are Becoming Learned Programs A material is texture maps, parameters and shader code. It is starting to become a small learned program that answers a rendering question. 6 min read 16 July 2026 Procedural Systems Are Expanding Beyond Geometry Geometry Nodes started with a narrow name. Blender 5.2 puts physics, sound and object data through the same graph. 6 min read 29 June 2026 The Unit of AI Work Is Becoming the Task, Not the Turn Chat taught us to think one turn at a time. Long-running agents make the task the thing that is scheduled, resumed and reviewed. 6 min read 24 June 2026 Game Engines Are Becoming Operating Systems for Worlds Engines have been judged on what they render and simulate. The Unreal 6 roadmap points at operating a world rather than drawing one. 6 min read 11 June 2026 The Model Is Becoming a Replaceable Backend Choosing a provider used to mean choosing an architecture. A stable interface makes replacement possible and evaluation makes it safe. 6 min read 17 April 2026 The Harness Is Part of the Capability The same model behaves differently depending on context policy, tool design and execution feedback. That surrounding software is not neutral. 6 min read 19 March 2026 Physics Engines Are Becoming Trainable Components A simulator predicts what happens next. A differentiable one can answer which parameter should change to stop the failure. 6 min read 13 March 2026 The Agent Needs an Environment, Not Just Tools A search function and a database query were enough for short loops. Longer work needs a place to stand. 6 min read 9 February 2026 Coding Agents Are Becoming General-Purpose Computer Workers Repositories were a friendly environment: text in, terminal actions, checkable results. That was a starting point, not a boundary. 6 min read 11 December 2025 Open Standards Outlive Model Generations A year after the MCP bet, the argument can be checked against what happened rather than what was hoped. 7 min read 20 November 2025 Colour Management Is a Pipeline Contract Blender 5.0 reads as better display options. Giving a file an explicit working colour space is an architectural change. 6 min read 11 August 2025 The Best Model May Be a Router, Not a Model GPT-5 moves model selection inside the system. The interesting unit stops being which model and becomes which compute policy. 6 min read 8 August 2025 World Models Are Not Game Engines Yet Genie 3 generates a navigable 720p world at 24 fps. Production work needs state you can inspect when something goes wrong. 6 min read 26 May 2025 Memory Is Becoming a System Capability A follow-up to the long-context argument. Storing, selecting and expiring facts is turning into a named part of the product. 6 min read 19 May 2025 Coding Agents Change the Unit of Software Work AI coding tools have been judged where code appears on screen. The boundary moves when the agent owns a task instead of a snippet. 6 min read