Writing for the Machines | Weeknotes #430

Writing with the Machine

I think that the process of writing in the world of infinite media is now one of … reduction.

This week I have “generated” about 10,000 words of first draft for a piece that is going to become a cornerstone blog post,. The initial shape of it came from an 90min long voice memo I recorded walking along the Thames whilst walking into town, round the shops and back again. Which mostly consisted of me just rambling and monologuing to myself about every single thing I could think of about the subject. When I pulled the transcript off my phone, it came to about 4,500 words.

Then I threw all sorts of documents and notes from Obsidian into a Claude project. These were notes and observations made over the last half decade or so of freelance work on worlds, thinking about code-spaces, notes and challenges we encountered implementing an interactive fiction engine, and my failed attempt to build an AI eval startup in 2024. I also threw in several relevant podcast scripts, along with other full-length posts from this blog and worldrunning.guide. All in all, this file dump came in at about 15,000 words. So before I even began writing anything, I had nearly 20,000 words of “cheap” material and previous effor sitting there waiting to be shaped.

That, I think, is what writing increasingly looks like in the world of infinite media? Or at least for people who have large corpus of their own thinking, note taking, and well developed point of view. It is less a matter of conjuring some slop from nothing with the language machine, and more and more a matter of reducing the overabundance of gunk into something that can be directed toward a new idea/direction.

The work now is to mostly select from the surplus, exercise ones taste, and decide what can be left out. It’s in this sense that writing becomes a process of reduction. To use a metaphor from the kitchen, it’s like making a roux or vegetable stock.

After gathering it all, I then asked the robot to make sense of it, and after several back and forth arguments, it came back with a 5,000-word essay plan. Which I then sat down with and over the last several days have written out the whole thing. I “generated” the piece with my voice and then with my fingers. It’s been mental taxing though as I’m trying to write it in a more formal register than I usually use on the blog. The sort of dense prose usually reserved for reports and research that I work on. It’s been a huge lift, but one prompted by urging from colleagues and co-conspirators to get this out into the world. “Now is the time”. And who am I to push back on people more successful than me?

New Knowledge Objects

As part of the work, I was drawing on my 2024 post Enchanted Knowledge Objects in LLM UI and wanted to demonstrate them in practice. My own preferred method for creating dense, context-shaping documents for machiens is to use a YAML DSL. You ask a thinking LLM to deconstruct a piece of writing into the domain-specific language, then ask it to re-express it as a set of structured rules or logic in YAML. Which you can then feed back into a machine.

Here is a sample of the first section of my Knowledge Objects post as YAML DSL

sections:
  - id: "section_1_new_metaphors"
    title: "From prompt engineering to context gravity"
    purpose: "Reframes the user's lived interaction with long-context models and names the need for a new conceptual vocabulary."
    implied_critiques:
      - "Prompt engineering language is too narrow for exploratory, branch-based, source-layered work."
      - "Current AI discourse understates how much uploaded texts reshape the whole reasoning field."
    argument_map:
      - id: "EKO.1"
        claim: "Long-context use has shifted from generation toward exploratory interrogation of large texts."
        evidence_quote: "shifted away from generating text toward something more exploratory"
        logic_path:
          because:
            - "Users ingest books, PDFs, and essays at large scale."
            - "They question, backtrack, branch, and layer sources."
            - "This behaviour is iterative rather than single-prompt output seeking."
          leads_to:
            - "The old prompt metaphor becomes insufficient."
            - "Interaction is better seen as context construction."
      - id: "EKO.2"
        claim: "Dense documents exert gravity that bends model attention and response space."
        evidence_quote: "it has a sort of gravity"
        associative_path:
          thematic_resonance:
            - "Space-time curvature"
            - "Massive objects warping a landscape"
            - "A context field being reshaped, not merely filled"
          conceptual_links:
            - "Context engineering"
            - "Semiotic sculpting"
            - "Knowledge architecture"
    takeaways:
      - "The essay's core move is conceptual; replace prompt-level thinking with context-field thinking."
      - "Documents are active forces in reasoning, not neutral attachments."

One of the benefits of these files is that you can feed them back to any model, whether in flash or thinking mode, and ask: “In your own words, recompose this YAML into a complete essay in prose.”

What you get back is a highly explicit version of the thing you wrote, often about one third as long as the original. which is also very weird thing to read, and really makes you think “Damn…why couldn’t I have been this direct” But that weirdness is sort of instructive (at least it is to me) as a lot of the processing of words in the 2020’s is just moving back and forth between expansion and compression.

Also this also led, in the way that keeping lists of things to do does, to an unexpected and sprawling subtask that needs addressing soon. Having finally hardened the prompt I use to make these things, I thought I’d better put my money where my mouth is. So I have set up a public GitHub repo for this blog, and very soon I will begin populating with key ideas and popular posts from this blog as YAML-structured markdown files. That way other people can think with my ideas as knowledge objects, and apply them to their own thinking and domains. Probably licensing them as CC BY-SA 4.0.

Writing For The Machine

Anyway, what this all leads to, in my mind, is a kind of new hybrid condition of writing with and for machines. In many ways we are in fact all writing for the machine now. This feels very close once again to Kevin Munger’s point in the Youtube Apparatus that the primary audience of the YouTuber is the algorithm. Only in this case, I’m writing and producing “text” to not simply to be ranked in search results or whatever, but to shape the mind of a machine directly, to leave behind structured traces that can be taken up, recomposed, and used again. It’s a new kind of audience entirely.

That seems meaningfully different? It is one thing to optimise for discovery with keyword stuffing etc. But it is another to write in such a way that will let the machine can think with you afterwards. The YAML files, the repo, the prompts, these are all part of the same experiment I’m moving towards. Attempts to make my ideas legible not only to humans, but now to synthetic readers too. The exact opposite of what I was thinking about creatively at the dawn of the AI era lol. Perhaps this is how I understand authorship now? A quote unquote “good” writer in the machine age can produce durable conceptual artefacts that survive contact with the model? I’m sure lots of people disagree with me about this though. haha.

I dunno, maybe I should just admit to myself publicly, that all I really want is for some small trace of me to live forever in the mind of the machine god?

So right now, the last week’s worth of non-stop work seems to be falling out like this. I think I’m going to release the super-long post once it’s done, a much smaller TL:DR post with AI researchers in mind, and a third follow-up post applying the ideas in the long post to a worked example.

Then a fourth post introducing the three texts as a sort of preamble. The first three posts themselves won’t go out to subscribers who read this via the newsletter, but I will send the preamble post out as a notification, as an invitation to explore.

Lastly, at some point in future, after the GitHub repo is a bit more populated, I’ll upload my “Talisman-Forge” prompts, and put out another post about making and producing knowledge objects, and why.

In other news, I also edited a new experience.computer interview, with Marco Giancotti from the blog aethermug.com.

Meanwhile the highlight of the week is that a new Andy Anderson feature dropped! 🛹

Anderson is, if not, the best skater in the world, he is certainly my favourite. Blending classic tricks from the late 70’s with modern skills in such an innovative way. He also seems like a really nice guy? Love the footage and the editing too. This is where we are in 2026 with skateboarding videos, and athlete at the top of their game making art.

Also, lol, if you’ve never heard of him, make sure to stick around for the credits to see just how many people were coming up to him and asking for photos and high fives etc.

On The Blog

Some more tweaks here and there around the blog this week. No posts.

I’ve updated my LinkedIn and other various web presences. I also updated the podcast show description that shows up in pod directories etc. Not quite keyword stuffing, but certainly better than the last 8 years. I’ve also overhauled the page that thejaymo.info sends you to, to be a more semi-professional ‘work with me’ style landing page. Not sure about it yet.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Added another 5k words to SLOP MACHINES. Mostly this week was some stuctural engineering in the back half i’ve been avoiding.
• Summarised 5 years of thinking about Code-Spaces and Interactive Fiction, and world design and how it applies to agent harnesses ontologically. Exhausted.
• Next Episode of Experience.Computer out next week!
• Last tweaks to the zine ready to go to print tomorrow. Might need an extra box to send to a exhibition – waiting to hear back before I pull the trigger.

Terminal Access

Sometimes a friend writes a piece so vital to the current moment that all I can do is urge you to read it. Cade Diehm’s new essay for New Design Congress is one of those pieces.

This essay also arrives with some important context. NDC went quiet for half a year in 2025 after a legal campaign, including a cease and desist in August 2025, blocked it from publishing and responding publicly around its digital identity research ahead of Switzerland’s e-ID referendum.

But in spite of the gracious sunlight, I feel a true evil on this boat with me. These men aren’t aberrations, they’re a template I’ve seen everywhere. They’re saying the same words I’d heard all week in the mansion. The same words I’d heard in the copycat San Francisco transplant coworking spaces of Melbourne, Sydney’s Silicon Beach, and Apple’s developer conferences: Violence, then rebuild; profit, then philanthropy – repeat! Different war, same business model, new interface, same shining eyes. “We’re making the world a better place.”

I suddenly see, clearly, the next twenty years in front of me: automated war, digital rights-managed food, not-so-precision strikes, it all comes crashing over my young psyche drowned in the same blood-stained, morally coded rhetoric. I realise that everything I had been arguing for – pseudonyms, safety, friction – all of it lives downstream from this mindset.

Reading

I pre-ordered Tchaikovsky’s newest book in the Children of Time series: ‘Children of Strife‘ this week. Looking forward to digging in.

I finally finished A Million Years of Music by Gary Tomlinson. What a masterpiece. It’s taken me nearly 3 months to read it. But I’ve been having my mind blown every single night, so its been totally worth it.

Partyraiser & Udow – Gabba Gabba (Single)

I have two modes when I’m writing, thinking and working. Right now its mostly exploring the last 100 year of Jazz. But especially building spreadsheets I find jungle insane breakcore adjacent music to be the perfect music for concentrating. This week, the terror/darkcore producer Partyraiser’s new single and back catalogue has been on heavy rotation. Your own enjoyment and MMV.

Remember Kids: