Architecture as Conversation
Somewhere in Mississippi, I started talking to my phone — and it started asking me questions. By the time I got home, that conversation had become a software design, a song sung at seventy miles an hour, and a plan I could build. AI can talk the talk. I still have to walk the walk.
Building the KNote Operating System — Post 1
It was somewhere in Mississippi, with the better part of a thousand miles ahead of me, that I reached for my phone and started talking.
To it. To my phone. Not to another person, but to an application named Claude just after 6:30 am.
I said “Okay. You’re gonna help me brainstorm around various workflows, ideas, skills and creative ways that I want to establish Claude in my personal life. This is related to KNote Studios, which I have set up as an LLC. Your goal is to be thorough, inquisitive, detailed, and prompt me for information that can be used to create projects, skills, and other tools to help me automate the workflow within this company.”
A press of a button and my words were quickly transcribed into text.
Submit.
Icons moved and Claude appeared to be thinking. Text soon began streaming back on my screen. I pressed a play icon at the end of the response, and a polite English voice responded.
“Love this. Before I can suggest workflows, skills, or automations worth building, I need to understand the shape of what you’re actually doing. Let me start with foundational questions, then we’ll dig into specifics in follow-up rounds.”
Now, I’d been diving deep into AI during my six weeks in New Orleans. Copilot at work, Claude after hours, and a tool called Suno I was using to figure out what AI was doing with music. But all of it lived in the cracks of the day: lunch hours, weekends, a coffee shop with a good wifi signal. AI had a seat at my desk. It had never had the wheel.
This interaction, however, was completely new. I was no longer typing at a computer and eyeballing its response. I was now talking out loud while moving seventy-ish miles down the freeway and listening to responses over the car’s speakers.
Claude heard my initial instructions and started challenging me. It asked me to explain my goals one by one. It asked about the geeky technologist who thinks about systems and architectures; the creative musician who writes lyrics and chord charts and improvises; the contemplative meditation instructor who practices loving-kindness and pushes against limited beliefs. My Claude buddy listened and questioned and colored in the lines of who I was and how the pieces fit together. It asked for the “why” and the “what” that drive me. It didn’t pretend to know the answers. It wasn’t feeding me knowledge. It was asking me for mine.
Around 11:00 am, after moving from a brain dump into software design, a completely different thought surfaced.
Could I use this drive to write lyrics, record my melodic ideas, and load them into Suno, an AI song-creation platform?
As a musician, I hear chords and melodies, rhythms and lyrical lines. All the time. I don’t keep music on in the background, as it pulls at my concentration. My ears and mind will analyze the harmonies. They will hear the conversation between the various instruments. It’s as if I were sitting in with the band and playing along with them. I don’t need to have Spotify or the radio on, as there’s typically an internal soundscape happening. I hear verses and choruses, hooks and bridges, instrumental interludes that form an arc of a song. It’s a craft I’ve been honing since I was an eight-year-old sitting at any piano I could find.
Was it possible to write a song while driving and talking into my phone?
I hear a melody, think about some words, and say “Time after time we keep falling back into these same old patterns”.
I listen inwardly and a melodic response appears. I spend a few minutes finding some words that flow from the first thought and record “Minute by minute we catch ourselves and bring us back online”
Line by line a verse and a chorus surface from my right-side radio brain. Rough sketch completed, I sing aloud what has been playing inside.
I upload the take into Suno. Two versions come back in two minutes. I press play, and a sassy female voice sings the story I just crafted back to me.
Suddenly those hours I’d half-resigned to podcasts and gas-station coffee turned into a long, rolling stream of vision dumps and creative outpourings. For two and a half days, those elusive thoughts I’d never said out loud in any clear, articulated way started crystallizing into something concrete. Song inspirations quickly captured became demo-ready musical works I could use to create chord charts and arrangements for real musicians to perform. The 20-plus hours I spent driving back to New York was a different creative flow than anything I had experienced before. It was exhilarating. Time passed quickly and I entered into a state of flow. I was seeing first-hand how transformative these new tools could be for my productivity.
Fast forward eight weeks and I’ve created tools beyond anything I have seen in my thirty years as a software developer. This drive laid out the pieces of the puzzle and a rough sketch of my dreamy goals. These pieces are now concrete objects built using programming languages and tools, like Python and Copilot Studio, I knew very little about at the start of the journey. There are songwriting assistants, chart-writing tools, and a workflow that feeds a custom content-creation platform tailored to how I think. These blog posts are created in it, and it knows my voice, where to publish things and how I wanted things automated. What started as a series of questions became a body of documents about me, my goals and stylistic leanings, and a set of requirements I could act on.
There is, however, a built-in tension to using this technology. AI is helping me accomplish more than I could imagine possible, but I’m a living, breathing, aging human who needs rest and friendship and time to turn off.
An hour of meditation doesn’t deliver the excitement of watching AI build my vision. And yet, that hour of sitting quietly is probably the single most important hour I spend each and every day. It’s what keeps my heart open and me aware of my emotions, thoughts, hopes and fears. The juicy nature of what life is all about. The dreams and relationships and regrets and disappointments that forged and strengthened my character. I am all the things that poured out during my drive back home and much, much more.
AI can talk the talk, but I need to walk the walk.
Next in the series: what I started writing down when I got home — the documents that turned a two-day conversation into something that could outlast the drive.
