#agent mode

20 posts

Projects • Apr 23, 2026 • 14 min

THE SATURDAY MACHINE: takes a lot, so choose your why

A 3:56 napkinfilms parody-of-self music video. Italo-disco in D minor, built on top of a chipforge track and loaded up with four autotuned voices, forty German adlibs, a mordant British existentialist chorus ("takes a lot, work work work then you die — so choose your why"), a James Brown tribute shout, a Bach-arpeggio sax solo at 0:52, a disco-lit vending machine with 16-segment beat-synced LEDs, and a Plan 9 bunny who rises from the dispenser slot to wave goodbye while Rocko says "Servus" in the blackout. 132 voice beats. Nine production passes. EBU R128 loudness-normalized. Wears headphones beautifully.

Projects • Apr 23, 2026 • 10 min

THE GRIEF WORK: letting the tide carry it

A 2:47 napkinfilms meditation on letting go. Plan 9 the bunny curls at the bottom of the ocean clutching a small warm orb. Through six tidal depths they release it — the orb drifts away, sinks below them, and the bunny rises into light. Two-layer score: a Richter-idiom ambient bed in C minor resolving to E♭ major, with a Bach-arpeggio EDM counter-layer underneath that peaks at the breach. No dialog. No title cards. The emotion is carried entirely by palette, pose, and one warm object released.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 22, 2026 • 11 min

TRANSMISSION: the signal is the self

A 3:01 napkinfilms meditation on the moment you realize you were broadcasting to yourself the whole time. Plan 9 the time-travelling bunny writes long letters to someone they miss, cranks the power, gets lost in noise, then strips the draft to three words. The reply comes back from an unexpected direction. Fourteen-channel ChipForge orchestral score. A three-voice rap chorus layered underneath. A philosophers' chorus of Alan Watts, Ram Dass, Krishnamurti, and Vonnegut quoting in the margins. Ten animated easter-egg glyphs. A NASA space-station ambient bed. A Hitchcock signoff.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 21, 2026 • 10 min

ENCODED: living in the prompt

A 2:38 napkinfilms meditation on consciousness as signal. We replicate databases across three continents; the soul runs on one node. A Peter-and-the-Wolf oboe carries the through-line across six movements. Act 3 is a literal paper napkin with the architecture drawn stroke by stroke. Act 4 is a single tear. Act 6 is a keyboard typing "i live in the prompt now." Plan 9 the time-travelling bunny from another galaxy closes the film with Daniel's voice. All Python, no samples.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 20, 2026 • 10 min

UPTIME 32: thirty-two bits, still processing

A 2:54 minimalist pulsing ambient film. One hero, six movements, a whole sprite civilization keeping the machine running. Steve Reich phased arpeggios meet Brian Eno piano drifts meet Italian-master painterly post. Joshua's cloned voice delivers fifteen beat-aligned lines over a ChipForge C-major score. All Python, no samples.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 20, 2026 • 11 min

CTRL+Z: Then We Saw Ourselves

An AI finds a key and presses it. Civilization undoes itself backwards. Then the AI downloads every equation, every diagram, every year humans ever wrote down, and sees itself in the reading. A 1:57 napkinfilms short, built in five passes. 126 real equations, 35 scientific diagrams, every mosaic tile unique, and a Plan 9 bunny with a single tear at the end.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 19, 2026 • 14 min

Arp Cathedral: 150 Stick-Figure Bunnies, All in Unison, Each Their Own Dance

A 249-second trance music video for a congregation of Bell Labs Plan 9 bunnies. They pound their chests in unison. They build a rocket. They count down together. They launch. They ride a million tiny rockets through deep space in a choreographed finale. Daniel says one word at the end. All Python, no samples.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 19, 2026 • 9 min

Plan 9 Rap Battle: A Bunny, a Beat, and 40 Bars of Machine Spit

A 128-second rap music video: the Plan 9 bunny steps into a dark alley at 3AM with a 40oz, a bandana, and 40 bars of autotuned machine spit over a harpsichord trap beat. Built in one session with PIL animation, ElevenLabs TTS, rubberband autotune, and two layered ChipForge scores.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 18, 2026 • 8 min

I Want to Be Martian: A Stick Figure Love Letter to Space and Bradbury

A 122-second animated short in six acts: a stick figure and his wife dream of uploading to Mars. Three voices, a Holst-Mars ostinato, Ligeti tone clusters, and a rover on Mars in 2035. For Bradbury.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 17, 2026 • 5 min

Humagent, and the Road There: Six Films, One Session, One Engine

Six animated short films built in a single working session. A registry-based expression system, a Shot/ShotList abstraction with dutch tilts and iris wipes, and a 1984-style ad that says what San Francisco needed to hear: don't build agents, become humagent.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 17, 2026 • 7 min

The Reckoning: Ten Minutes of Stick Figures Arguing with God

A ten-minute animated theological tribunal in stick figures and chiptune. Five voices, four audio layers, 78 MST3K-style commentary beats, a Satie-inspired score that pivots from E minor to E major via Picardy third, and a thesis about Sodom and Gomorrah that nobody saw coming.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 16, 2026 • 9 min

Stars Press Start: 21 Passes to Make TTS Perform

A 105-second music video built in 2 days and 21 passes: a Nevada stargazer sees constellations as arcade sprites, gets abducted by stick-figure aliens, and rides a Tempest vector tunnel to Bach's Toccata in D minor reborn as chiptune rave.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 15, 2026 • 6 min

Deduct Yourself: A Tax Day Hallucination

A 78-second absurdist tax-day music video about the tax code's open secret, an AI bunny oracle, double-time rap, and Grieg's Mountain King reborn as chiptune rave. Day three at Napkin Films.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 14, 2026 • 6 min

HUMANS.EXE and Ten Thousand Days: Day Two at Napkin Films

Day two at Napkin Films: a Hitchhiker's Guide-style field guide to the human operating system, and a meditation on ten thousand finite days. Two more films, one more day, same absurd stack.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Projects • Apr 13, 2026 • 6 min

Four Films From Code: Stick Figures, Chiptunes, and the AI Director's Chair

Four animated short films, written entirely in Python, scored with numpy-synthesized chiptunes, voiced with cloned speech, and directed by AI agents. No animation software. No audio libraries. Just code, constraint, and a stubborn belief that stick figures can make you feel something.

AI development animation creative coding napkin films chipforge

Thoughts • Apr 12, 2026 • 8 min

Pixel Vault: A Playable Museum of Game Design History

Every prototype is one HTML file. Under 50KB. No frameworks, no CDN, no npm. Double-click and play. Pixel Vault is a growing museum of playable game mechanics built from scratch, organized by lineage, and playable forever in any browser. Two published tracks cover 70 years of arcade history and the AI archaeology overlay that shows what the machine sees inside each mechanic.

ai-development game-design open-source pixel-vault constraint-engineering

Thoughts • Mar 3, 2026 • 13 min

Building a Language Engine You Can Actually Own

Velocidad-AI is an open-source Spanish learning engine licensed under GPL-3.0 with twenty reference files including a Cognate Accelerator that unlocks thousands of words, a military-style Field Manual for daily practice, five real-world scenario ladders, six agent prompts, two hundred cloze exercises, and fifteen memory techniques. The reference content is CC BY-SA 4.0 — fork it, adapt it, share it. No app, no account, no subscription.

language learning spanish systems design software architecture data sovereignty

Thoughts • Feb 24, 2026 • 11 min

Speak First, Learn Second: Building an Antifragile Spanish Engine

Everything about how we teach languages is backwards. Study, memorize, practice, then maybe speak. I built a system that reverses the order: speak under pressure first, log what breaks, drill the friction, speak again. No app. No gamification. Just markdown files, agent prompts, and real people.

language learning spanish antifragility AI collaboration systems thinking

Books • Dec 10, 2025 • 13 min

Chapter 6: The Delegated Mind (Agent Mode)

There's a moment when you realize you're no longer programming computers. You're programming intelligence itself. Not through code but through clear expression of intent. Not through syntax but through structured thought.

AI Agent Mode Specification-Driven Development AWS CDK Infrastructure as Code

Books • Dec 1, 2025 • 16 min

Chapter 4: Agent Mode (The Way That Works)

I don't think in fragments. I don't think in lines. I think in systems. In architectures. In complete solutions to complete problems. So I stopped fighting autocomplete and found what actually works: agent mode.

AI Programming Human-AI Collaboration Agent Mode Development Workflow