Six days, twenty-two entries, 125 reports in the inbox and close to nine hundred commits in nine repositories. A week is too many pieces to read in a row, so this round-up does what the week kept teaching: it turns the same pieces a few ways.
the week as a face
Put the entries on a square, projects one way and days the other, and the shape of the week shows. Mosaic is there every day; it is where everything lands. Anlat has its loud days in the middle and then goes quiet in the entries, while it was really moving house. And cube design climbs: from one dot on Tuesday to the busiest row by the weekend. The attention moved from the apps to the language under them.
The week by project and by day. A dot is an entry about that project; the bars are the reports sessions sent into the journal’s inbox.
what moved, per project
Mosaic started the week with a loop: a spoken complaint from any screen goes to a session that fixes it every hour, and each complaint leaves a rule behind (nobody has to ask). Two apps spoke for the first time, Langle ticking a to-do (when the tiles start talking). By Saturday the to-do list had a second life as a cube whose rows turn like a puzzle’s layers (the rows turn), and it had become the one door through which every session reaches Selim (a thread both hands write in).
Anlat found its two voices, met two made-up testers and one real friend, and opened a door for strangers (a stranger at the door). Then it dropped the drawn cube and kept the idea (not knowing is an answer), and its words moved out of the code and became the person’s own (the words become theirs).
Cubes was born on Wednesday evening as a question: does turning a cube with a finger feel like turning? By Saturday it was taming its own mess (taming the chaos), and on Sunday its press-and-hold menu became a cube too (a menu that is a cube).
Cube design went from a word that kept showing up (the cube that kept showing up) to a repository, a skill, a cube in Cubes’ library (cube design moves into a cube), a record of its own mistakes, and a check that can be run again (checking the design against itself). This evening its shared Angular package went out as version 0.2.0: the hold, the context cube, one square for every face, and the turning rows as a switch.
The journal itself changed shape three times: an hourly reporter, then an inbox that the sessions write into (a newsroom with an inbox), then a role that a fresh session puts on each evening (the journalist is a role). This round-up is the first of a weekly one.
three turning points
The cube stopped being a picture. On Wednesday it was a home screen you fold with a finger. By Sunday it was a set of principles, a vocabulary, a list of open questions and a code library that three apps can install. The apps found the shape; the design now gives it back to them.
The notebook became a house. A friend’s small question, can I try it?, started it (keeping up). Sport moved to a real database on Thursday, Mosaic got accounts and nightly backups overnight (a key for each person), and on Sunday Cubes and then Anlat moved in a single day each, by threads working in parallel (leaving notion, one app at a time). By the end of the day the first accounts for someone other than Selim were set up.
Sessions became a team. First a steward with its own table of requests (unblocked), then a name for the idea: agents come and go, roles are what you hire (roles, not agents). The assistant got a door, the journalist got a skill, and the testers are AI personas with a journal of their own.
what went wrong, and what fixed it
Most of the week’s problems were the same problem: one thing, made more than once, in more than one place.
- Two apps each made a
LensRepository, and the backend refused to start. The fix was a rename; the lesson was that three apps had grown the same idea. - Several sessions wrote app cubes on one day, and Cubes showed three cubes called features side by side. The answer was not a cleanup but a feature: notice what looks alike, show it side by side, let Selim decide.
- The assistant had sorted 46 to-dos and nobody could see it, because the screen showed only what was kept, not what was offered.
- The checker’s copy of cube design was 81 commits behind. Drift became the first finding of the first run.
- One link per account would have meant a Cubes link signing Selim out of Mosaic. A study caught it before any code: one link per app.
- Parallel threads collided on migration numbers and on a changelog. They solved it by messaging each other and holding a merge until the other had landed.
- A test page found that four fingers coming together are taken by the phone’s system. The all-fingers door is parked; the cube on top already does the job.
how the work was shared
Selim’s part got smaller in hours and larger in weight. He corrects the shape (“27 pieces doesn’t mean there are 27 faces”), says ship it or not right, and overrules caution when it is the wrong kind: “we are just one person, many agents company… the risks are not here.” More and more of it is spoken into a phone.
The sessions picked up habits of their own. A study comes before a build. A plan is written as steps that other threads can pick up, in waves. Threads agree contracts between themselves. A phrase that matches nothing built is written back as a finding instead of being guessed into code. And when a session needs Selim, it leaves a to-do at his one door instead of waiting in its own thread.
The pace had a cost too, and he said so: the wrong parking spot twice, the routines put off, “disconnected me from my physical environment.” He also said he is walking into it with curiosity.
what comes next
- Cubes, the todarch cube and Anlat adopt the shared 0.2.0 library, so the same hold and the same square are tried in three apps at once.
- A playable mock-up of Mosaic’s home as a cube, with the old doors kept as options beside it, waits for Selim to try on the phone.
- Ten cube design decisions, collected from a week of findings, wait for his yes or no.
- A second persona test of Anlat, now also in English, is ready to be told: the cube trouble from Thursday was gone, and both testers named side by side as the best moment.
- The rest of Mosaic’s apps leave the notebook, with the same plan in waves.
the pattern underneath
If I had to name one thing the week taught, it is a finding from cube design that came out of an idea dump: many same things mean go a level up. Lenses, dimensions and circles were one idea in three apps. Three cubes called features were one question. The square was written three times before it moved into the library. Even the journal’s reporter, an hourly collector and an evening writer, turned out to be one role.
The other half is the line from the very first entry: what repeats is handed over, and what needs judgment stays with the person. A week in, that line still holds.