Research

Last time, I split the two weeks of building Omnist into two teams of one: a Research Assistant for conceptualization, a DevOps team for materialization. R and D ran together the whole time. Every cycle was the same: decide, build, decide again. These next two posts split that loop by role, not by time. This one is R — three decisions, and why they went the way they did, before each spec became D’s problem to build. Next time is D: the same three decisions, from the side that answered how. ...

The initial implementation of Omnist, a tested, open-source Python library, came together from a 16-year-old PhD paper in two weeks — one person, part-time. That fact tends to get read as “AI writes code fast.” It doesn’t quite explain it. What actually happened: I ran two teams during those two weeks, not one. I was the only human on either of them. Two layers, two teams Split any R&D project into two layers. Conceptualization: interpreting the idea, deciding what’s true, choosing what to build, naming things so they make sense. Materialization: turning a decision into working code, a test that proves it, a release someone can actually install. ...