From idea
to product.

Simulated Recall via Shallow Indexing, or SR-SI, gave that work a maintained map: where to look, which decisions still mattered, and what had changed. It began in code and development. As I used it, I started asking what the same discipline could mean beyond them.

A design carries reasons, a company carries decisions, and a person carries moments that change how everything after them is understood. Preserving those things requires judgment about what should remain available, who gets to decide, and what should be allowed to fade.

What Deserves to Persist follows that question through design systems, organizations, temporary software and the digital self. Information starts provisional. Its source, recurring value, compression and continued relevance help determine whether it earns a place in future decisions. People retain authority over that process.

Ocarina is where I explore these questions through things I can build. The products approach different needs; the attention to context, ownership and change runs through the practice.

Training, writing, music, maps and the connection between design and code. Each has its own demands. Building the product is how I find out whether the thinking holds up.

Explore a project to see what it does, the question behind it and where it stands today.

The AI Memory Prosthesis explains the method and its evidence. The later essay asks what happens when selective memory becomes a design concern for organizations, software and our own lives.

Why I named the studio Ocarina Systems explains the product ambition behind the name: a small instrument that contains what it needs to work.

Sila explores continuity across event operations. Hush investigates what control people can have over the automated analysis of their voice. Both remain work in progress.

The early SR-SI work kept encountering the same problem: code survived, while the context needed to change it had to be reconstructed from scratch. A maintained index gives the next person or agent a route back to the decisions, constraints and sources that matter.

This is an interpretation of the essay’s argument about context. Keeping the reason available gives future work something to question, revise or carry forward.

A component expresses a design decision, a tool sits inside a workflow, and a map connects terrain to the world being written around it. Those relationships shape what a change will mean.

The essay moves between these scales. Gestalt explored them through nested maps; Atlas Lab approaches them through geography. Each makes a different part of the larger picture available to inspect.

Information loses relevance. A tool can serve its purpose and disappear. An interpretation of a person may need to be corrected. A system that preserves everything at equal weight makes those changes harder to see.

The essay gives decay a deliberate place in the design: revisit what the system trusts, retain what still helps, and allow the rest to lose authority. Gestalt’s retirement belongs in this story too.

A program contains decisions: how to progress, when to reduce the load, what to do after a missed session. Protocol makes those rules part of the routine so they can guide execution instead of living in a separate spreadsheet or someone’s head.

The training experience connects planning, logging and progression. The coaching workspace extends that structure to the relationship between a coach, a plan and the person following it.

Capture a thought by voice or keyboard, give it a place among pages and sections, and connect it with links, tags and files. The notebook is one portable local file, with export and history built around keeping the work yours.

Speech processing stays on the device after model setup. The wider direction is to bring writing and the relationships between ideas closer together; Gestalt’s system-mapping work informs that direction.

Gestalt explored fractal navigation: moving from a broad view into architecture, components and decisions while keeping their relationships legible. It gave complex thinking a structure with depth.

Gestalt is now retired. Its direction is intended to continue within Vellumap. That work is a continuation to build, rather than a completed integration.

Artefact explores records of the moments, reactions and patterns that keep mattering in a life. The question is how to distinguish what someone recorded from what a system inferred, and how those interpretations should change when the person challenges them.

The existing Oracle experiment uses a ritual interface to explore reflection and recorded sessions. Artefact is the wider inquiry into personal continuity and digital legacy. The experiment does not establish that a person or consciousness can be preserved.

It began with wanting to learn the ocarina with my daughter. The app connects the sound, the note on the staff, its letter or solfège name, and the holes to cover on the instrument.

Lessons, demonstrations and practice share the same musical view. You can move at a set tempo or practise one note at a time. The prototype also explores turning humming into an editable score; real-voice accuracy remains a work in progress.

Olives extracts components, their relationships, variants and styling references from a React codebase into an inspectable index. That gives design and development a shared record to work from as the interface changes.

Extraction and enrichment are implemented. Full design-tool synchronization remains in development. Alongside Olives, I’ve worked on design-to-code agents that carry visual intent, component structure and styling constraints into implementation, then review the result through a component surface. That approach has been tested with Codex, React and Tailwind.

Atlas Lab grew alongside Ashurim, a fictional world. It brings maps, terrain, features and authored notes into a connected workspace, so an idea about a place can become geography you can work on.

The current prototype supports map editing, numerical terrain sculpting and recoverable project snapshots. It remains an evolving worldbuilding tool; a plausible-looking map still needs the author’s judgment.

Simulated Recall via Shallow Indexing began with the context repeatedly lost while building software with AI. A compact master index points to the relevant area; scoped records lead to the current source. The agent consults that structure before work and maintains it when the system changes.

The paper explains the method, its evolution and measurements from my own projects. These are applied findings, with their limits documented in the paper. The questions opened by that work led beyond development to What Deserves to Persist.

An ocarina contains its own mechanism, resonance chamber and interface. You pick it up and play. That completeness is what drew me to the name.

The essay sets out a product direction: tools with a clear purpose, usable without surrendering your work to a platform. The instrument gives that ambition a physical form.

For Ocarina, this is an ambition to build towards. Vellumap’s local notebook is one expression of it; the other projects explore different parts of the practice.

Sila connects event setup, registration, attendee records and check-in in one organizer workspace. It addresses the work that otherwise gets spread across forms, lists and messages.

The current implementation includes registration and check-in flows, with operational setup still in progress. The focus is the continuity of running an event and knowing who is there.

Hush investigates local audio filtering as a possible response to unwanted automated transcription and analysis. The ambition is to preserve intelligibility for the people in a conversation while disrupting machine interpretation.

A Windows-first audio prototype and evaluation tools exist. Whether that ambition holds across real voices and analysis systems is still a research question; Hush does not yet offer a proven protection claim.

That can begin with an idea that needs shape, an existing product that needs a clearer direction, or the work of carrying a design through implementation. The studio is my practice: the thinking and the making stay connected.

My consulting website covers the ways we can work together, my background and selected client work.