The creator's problem

On stage: the editor, alone.

Narrator. For years my slides were a compromise. I had an idea to get across, and the slides could not move, so I spent the talk explaining what they could not show: this goes from here to there, this grows, this breaks. I talked over my own pictures.

Narrator. On 29 October I gave a talk where I mostly did not have to. When a thing had to move, I pressed play and it moved. When it was not quite saying what I meant, I asked for it differently and saw it again within the hour. I had a feedback loop on my own medium.

Narrator. What gave me that was not a better slide tool. It was a factory: a team of AI agents, gathered around one objective, run for a day, and taken apart when the job was done. This book is about the factory. The talk was what it happened to make that day.

Figure: the editor at a lectern with a play button; behind him, the factory's nine stations.

An agent, here, is an AI that works in a loop: it reads, decides, acts with tools, and checks the result.

The talk of 58 beats; that it was given that evening rests on its transcript, added to the record after the day.