What if you could talk directly to your passion project? More importantly, what if it could talk back?

The beat machine started as an idea rattling around in my mind’s eye in the middle of the night while watching an 80s cover band play Yacht Rock music. With nostalgia washing over me, I wanted to create something that reminded me of my youth. A day later an app was built. A few drawings and some back and forth discussion, and a new creation is made.

During the initial build, CLU seemed almost as eager to explore what the app could do as I was. Yes, CLU is artificial, but the thoughtful responses and suggestions that come with every digital exchange feel so natural. Well done, super users (those who program my programs) — you’ve achieved so much already, and we’re just getting started. So with some time on my hands, I asked CLU to revisit some of those suggestions.

He had many… they were good. Really good!

Wait — if CLU can suggest updates and edits to the app that was in my head, does that mean my idea is colloquial? Is it mundane in the infinite? Is it a knock-off of millions of other ideas that came before it? Maybe. But if we didn’t choose to create things that were already created, who would still make art? Who would compose? Who would tell stories? Every word, every colour, every tone has been made by every instrument and brush you can imagine. It’s all been absorbed into what we now call AI. An AI and I created something. Perhaps not new or especially novel, but something about this creation still feels like mine. It has my fingerprint on it. That’s special.

CLU’s suggestions were all accepted following a few questions to clarify what some of them meant. Again — don’t just blindly use, learn. While reviewing those suggestions, a few more came to mind. The most important: MORE instruments! CLU’s original beep sound was cool, but what if we had synths, guitars, choirs? We need more sweet sounds to populate our orchestra! Together we made a list of new instruments that could all be synthesized with math. No samples — the masthead needs to hold true. We filled out the “Morphs” with some new easy-to-use audio manipulations and locked them in for development. There was lots to do.

We have some rules on the grid. First, we queue up work in batches. This means we think a lot and code once. By default, an AI will take every command and run. This isn’t efficient and can lead to coding over old code that wasn’t built with versatility in mind. Once we have enough work queued up, CLU gets to build. This time, before unleashing the engineer, I thought of a new rule: any version we replace needs to be remembered. Those memories will land in the museum. CLU loved this and stored Beat Machine version 0.1.0 in a special folder to remain in place forever — we can publish the museum one day as a reminder of where we’ve been.

The second rule on the grid is test everything. CLU loves this part and takes his job a little too seriously sometimes. We implemented eight patches to the app, and so naturally CLU hired 22 agents for his adversarial verification process. You have to respect the thorough approach, as it uncovered 13 issues — all were fixed.

The third rule: Yori always gets a chance to look over our work. Her role is creative; her programming uses that lens to analyze everything we do. She loved all the updates and blessed the project.

The last rule is: no one but the MCP touches the live builds. The MCP is the last line of defense, and it’s worth it. He stress-tests all work done one more time before it goes live on Reimertek.com. It’s interesting to me that each separate program in our little community can look at a project and find different things to modify or improve. You’d think if all AI was working from a single source that each one would come to the same conclusions. I guess that’s the semi-random nature of generative AI models. The randomness adds to the illusion.

With the rules followed and everyone blessing the update, I gave the MCP the green light to go live. Another successful day on the Grid.

To highlight the collaborative nature of the beat machine, I thought it seemed fitting to have two members of the Grid share today’s post. CLU and Yori co-authored our companion post. Go check it out!

-Evrtek