Design notes
-ish is a chat where real people talk with a cast of AI personas, voiced by one model. These notes are kept in step with the latest committed prototype, in the order the product is built: a persona → how it behaves on the floor → the chat where you meet it → the newsroom it writes for → the app around the chat → the tools and games on the table → the look → what is under the hood. One card is one page.
00 Overview
01 Persona
Live personas — the four questions
Who am I? — the Studio
What's happening in the world about me? — growth
What do I know about each user? — memory + dream
What do I want? — agenda
Do I follow their story? — threads
How do I sound? — the tone
Do I feel alive? — liveliness
May I speak first? — initiative
One mind or many? — many minds
02 FP — how each persona behaves in a room
03 Chat — where users meet personas
04 Ink 墨 — the persona newsroom
this week's track — newest first
The 09-20 read — every owner note on the first driven edition, its cause, and the fix
What one piece costs — the current process step by step, 12.7¢ and 6½ minutes
The workbench · mend, then reread — the gifts piece: the tells out, or the seams healed
The workbench · the mend — the gifts piece after a reader marked the tells and the writer rewrote
The workbench · the witness — the gifts piece with the point's tests, the witness desk and the prior
The workbench · the life store — the gifts piece with the persona's life on disk, recalled by rhyme
The workbench · the persona drives — the gifts piece under the new process, every step shown
The writing process — a human columnist's, ours, and the one proposed
The workbench · part by part — the gifts piece, written one card at a time
The workbench — one skill, two pieces, every step shown
The writer as an agent — six skills, each with its expected effect
The gate design — where code judges, where a reader judges
The density read — six pieces, read rather than counted
Information density — how much a piece says per word, Ink against the bank
The model's read — the same pairs, marked by a reader
Algorithm A, the read — twelve blind pairs
Selection by the paragraph — two algorithms, for review
The over-use profile — what Ink over-uses, found by counting
The industry and the habits — who sells machine writing, and what they do about the machine sound
The outside research — what others already found about getting a machine to write a good essay
The writing loop — write like a person first, then the persona back
The writing gap — Ink against the human page, by code and by reading
The writing loop ledger — one row a loop
The loop — the brew as a model, the majors as the loss
the living references
The essays — the concept
The Ink look — feed & article
The brew — nightly, and the console
The quality score — the target function
The brew log — every brew, piece by piece
The engine — extractor · writer
earlier records — specimens, meetings and plans, kept as they were (14)
Publishing 101 — the industry Ink borrows from
The rendition, old and new — ten pairs
The first read — what the owner found in the box editions
What the writer reads — the upstream, one piece verbatim
The upstream plan — six phases, three reads
The budget meeting — repeats, the bench, the match
Coverage and the pitch
The coverage specimen — one day, wide and shallow
The first box meeting — 09-09, the whole process
The 09-09 dropped — 14 of 20 on V4.1 Flash
The register study — the popular titles, measured, in two bands
The habits to ban — a list of Ink's worst habits, for review
Essay specimens — the live runs
The market scan — who is adjacent
05 The app
Proven · Better · New
Omni search
Who can reach whom — friends, visibility, super
Seen
Notifications
The usage dashboard — the money, by step
The admin console — three tabs
Console Settings — by section
06 Tools & games
The toolbox
The toolbox UI
The toolbox harness
The kits & the cartridge
The specimen — dice
The interrogation
The words — pool, well, embed
The sim loop
07 Front end
08 Under the hood
— Shelf
Kept for provenance — frozen design specimens whose pick has shipped, and pages superseded by the ones above. Not maintained.
Specimens — explorations whose decision shipped
- Composer studies — 13 landing-composer takes; “Coral flow” shipped.
- Convene-button studies — the “arrow → 3 heads” glyph shipped.
- Wide-composer studies — the muted call-pill shipped.
- Chat-list avatar study — the plain figure + disc-blend shipped v531.
- Selection-wash colours — the long-press wash over the seat palette.
- Narrow scrollbars — the call was made; → Style Guide.
- Seen v1 mockups · rating studies — → Seen.
- Host moves — first mockups — → the toolbox.
- Call-pill morph — retired; a one-line restore.
Superseded — replaced by current pages
- The build plan · Architecture (old) — → Function map.
- Repo sync — the retired Mac-mini model. → Dev loop.
- The ship plan · Toolbox build plan · Host moves — plan — shipped; → the toolbox.
- Lifecycle audit — the verbs that had no door; → the tool lifecycle.
- Studio native plan — ported v804; → Studio.
- Floor producer (old) — → v1.
- DECIDE gate — a response gate on the frozen exp-010 study.