
<figure>
![🌅 🌸](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2024-09-20.jpg)

<figcaption>_Blue Sky Thinking — [09/20/24](/sketches-2024-09-20)_</figcaption>
</figure>

I had a blast spending time [creating digital paintings](/blog/chris%20Learns%20Digital%20Painting) this year!

A couple of years ago, I was overcome with the desire to _really_ learn to draw. I made crude comics as a kid, but I was itching to really figure out how it's done. And so I did, and [I learned a lot about art and creativity from it](/lessonsfromdrawing2023)!

This year I turned my focus to the world of color and texture through digital painting. It was quite the leap! From single toned, line driven analog art making in a sketchbook — over to color and shape based painting through a digital medium.

Much of what I have to say this year is a revisiting of ideas I came across last year. Only this time the context has changed. A bit of a variation on a theme!

<figure>
![💡](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2024-05-04.jpg)
<figcaption>_Still Life — [5/4/24](/sketches-2024-05-04)_</figcaption>
</figure>

## Changing the Way You See the World

> I also love to listen to skaters talk about how they see the world. Skateboarding seems to reconfigure your molecules and changes the way you look and the kind of attention you pay to the world. (Exactly what we hope for when practicing any art.)
>
> — [Austin Kleon](https://austinkleon.com/2022/11/07/drawing-at-the-skate-park/)

Drawing with line art, especially in a stylized way, involves a great deal of abstraction and reduction. I spent time simplifying a form to only a few strokes and basic shapes. It changed how I saw the world. But more in a way of capturing shorthand. I was looking for the simplified essence.

Learning to see color through painting had the _exact opposite effect_! When I started studying color and light as well as doing direct-painting still lifes, it's as if I was starting to see for the first time.

A pot is just "orange" until you take a closer look at the texture, the lighting, the chips and smudges across its surface. There's a humbling amount of color in everyday life that gets simplified and overlooked.

Miranda and I went to a couple of art museums this year. Paintings are already captivating when you're not an artist. They're then astonishingly rich and awe inspiring once you know the attention to detail that goes into them!

The process of painting is great fun. Though, my favorite takeaway from picking up the craft is now how I see the world. You won't believe how something as simple as looking into someone's eyes will bring out a world of beauty hiding in plain sight!

<figure>

![Sweet little Lucy loving on this pretty sky](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2024-03-09.jpg)

<figcaption>_Pup at Twilight — [3/9/24](/sketches-2024-03-09)_</figcaption>

</figure>

## Balancing Projects with Play

After a few years, I've largely gotten better about balancing [play and study](https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/2). The boundary for me has become really clear since painting has been an entirely new medium requiring _lots_ of study, master copies, and reading up on how the brush engine works.

Even still — When I work on a digital painting project for myself, I'd call it play. But it's not entirely in that category. I realized something was missing.

It wasn't until I picked my physical sketchbook back up and started fooling around that things clicked into place. Unsurprisingly, having an analog, private, free space with no large end goal helped keep my spirit up when I returned to the digital canvas.

I've since deviated from needing a hard boundary, a la [the 50% rule](https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/2/50percent). These days my energy level is a good indicator of whether today is painting day or a fool around in the sketch book day.

If I were to package this up into advice: Be mindful of the project driven work, study, and time
spent fooling around.

Actually, that lines up nicely with Robertryan Cory's recommended routine for artists from [his CalArts lecture](https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.833375406677877): "Educational, Disciplinary, Experimental. Drawing should be divided into a sustainable work routine."

<figure>

![🌅 🌸](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2023-09-24.jpg)

<figcaption>_An early swing at digital painting — [09/24/23](/sketches-2023-09-24)_</figcaption>

</figure>

## In Pursuit of Truth

In music, the major scale is derived from the harmonic series: a natural occurring phenomena that represents mathematical divisions of any given frequency. (For one of the best demonstrations of this, look no further than [the Bernstein Norton Lectures](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HjEAtJXssc&ab_channel=LeonardBernstein).)

It's a major reason why tonal music is universal. It's what makes music a pursuit of Truth. [In Harmonic Experience](/bookshelf#HarmonicExperience), W. A. Mathieu walks readers through singing exercises where you experience the balance of these sounds firsthand. It's an eye opening journey.

I'm not as well-read on light as I am acoustics, but I know this much: colors themselves are different wavelengths of light. Violet is a short wavelength, red a long one.

It's one thing to know that intellectually. And a wholly other thing to experience it.

At some point, after working at a still life, spending an hour closely trying to match the color of a dull pot, I stepped outside. It was a clear day, mid afternoon. A rich blue sky, I observed. High in saturation today.

As my gaze came downward, I saw the leaves on the tree. And while it's hard to explain in writing — a resonance occurred. I started seeing the green of the leaves as a continuation of the blue in the sky. Not in an intellectual way, but on something much more deep and personal.

In the same way that each tone of music contains a multitude of different sounds, I made the connection that light was working in that same way. Obvious to some, I'm sure, but a revelation to me.

There are plenty of reasons to paint. Maybe one of the most worthwhile, though, is that — just like studying sound — you spend time with another Truth in the world. This time, through color and light.

<figure>
![🌳🌳🌳](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2024-07-06.jpg)

<figcaption>_Campion Trail – [07/06/24](/sketches-2024-07-06)_</figcaption>
</figure>


Lessons From a Year of Painting



I came across Maggie Appleton's tremendous post ["A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden"](https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history)! 

I've heard of the publishing philosophy in passing and found the term itself to resonate. A counter to high-production, corporate leaning purposes for owning a domain name, a digital garden assumes work in progress, a broad spectrum of topics and interests, and an ever evolving space online where ideas and things of beauty can blossom. _Lovely!_

There are a few patterns that show up with folks that have taken on the spirit of digital gardening. One that caught my eye was "Topography over Timelines." 

> Gardens are organized around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to others.
> 
> This runs counter to the time-based structure of traditional blogs: posts presented in reverse chronological order based on publication date.
> 
> Gardens don't consider publication dates the most important detail of a piece of writing. Dates might be included on posts, but they aren't the structural basis of how you navigate around the garden. Posts are connected to other by posts through related themes, topics, and shared context.
> 
> One of the best ways to do this is **through Bi-Directional Links** – links that make both the destination page and the source page visible to the reader. This makes it easy to move between related content.
> 
> Because garden notes are densely linked, a garden explorer can enter at any location and follow any trail they link through the content, rather than being dumped into a "most recent” feed.


_Love it!_ My favorite discoveries are with sites that link well. It's a blast hopping around, continuing the conversation from page to page. Wikis are the prime example of this. Tough, some bloggers like [Austin Kleon](https://austinkleon.com/) also do this particularly well.

So! Why only be bound by linking in one chronological direction? I took to the idea and whipped up a script to employ this myself!

## Developing Bi-Directional Linking

[This site uses markdown](/parsemd) for posts. So doing this job is largely about text parsing. Much of the logic, in fact, is similar to [how I parse my posts to display an art grid](/artgrid).


I'll start by writing the function to actually get the url value from my links. The regex is looking for the value with parenthesis in the typical markdown shorthand for links: `![alt text](link)`

```JavaScript
// api.js

export const getInternalLinksFromMarkdown = (md) => {
  const regex =
    /(?:__|[*#])|\[(.*?)\]\(\/(.*?)\)/g;
  return Array.from(md.matchAll(regex)).map((res) => {
    if (res && res.length > 1) {
      return res[2];
    }
  });
};

```

The value of index 2 of the array will give me the capture group I've targeted because that's [how it's done in Node](/noderegex)!

From here, I'll then pass in my posts and systematically generate an object that grabs both the targeted url as well as the current post url.

```JavaScript
// api.js

export function getAllPostRefs(
  fields = ['content', 'slug', 'title'],
  options = {}
) {
  const slugs = getPostSlugs();
  let posts = slugs
    .map((slug) => getPostBySlug(slug, fields))
    // Filter false values (.DS_STORE)
    .filter((post) => post)
    // sort posts by date in descending order
    .sort((post1, post2) => (post1.date > post2.date ? -1 : 1));

  const links = {}
  posts.forEach((post) => {
    const postLinks = getInternalLinksFromMarkdown(post.content);
    postLinks.forEach((src) => {
      if (src && !src.includes('/')) {
        if (!links[src]) {
          links[src] = [];
        }
        if (!links[src].find(entry => entry.slug === post.slug))
        links[src].push({
          slug: post.slug,
          title: post.title,
        })
      }
    });
  })

  return links;
}

```

A Set data structure would be ideal for keeping duplicates out of the list, but we'll be converting this to JSON, and I'd rather avoid the hassle of bringing in a library for the conversion.

Finally, I'll call this function and save the results to a JSON file for refference.

```JavaScript
biDirectionalLink.js

import { getAllPostRefs } from "./api"
const FileSystem = require("fs");

export const getRefs = () => {
	const links = getAllPostRefs();
	FileSystem.writeFile('_cache/backlinks.json', JSON.stringify(links), (error) => {
    if (error) throw error;
  });
}

```

Here's an snippet of what it generates:

```
{
	"30": [
		{
			"slug": "2022",
			"title": "2022"
		},
		{
			"slug": "iwataonpeople",
			"title": "Iwata on Creative People"
		},
		{
			"slug": "transcience",
			"title": "Transience"
		},
		{
			"slug": "web2000",
			"title": "A Love Letter to 2000s Websites"
		}
	],
	"2022": [
		{
			"slug": "testingandwriting",
			"title": "Testing Software for the Same Reason You Write Notes"
		}
	],
	
	...
}
```

Voilà! Now I have the data of pages that are referenced. I can now call this method anytime the site regenerates and use this as the source of truth for back-linking.

To consume this in Next.js, I'm going to read the file in `getStaticProps` (or in an RSC if I were using the App Router)

```
// [slug].js

export async function getStaticProps({ params }) {
  if (post) {
    const file = await fs.readFile(process.cwd() + '/_cache/backlinks.json', 'utf8');
    const backlinks = JSON.parse(file);
    let pagesLinkingBackTo = null;

    if (backlinks[params.slug]) {
      pagesLinkingBackTo = backlinks[params.slug];
    }
```

And, following some prop drilling, I can now programmatically display these on matching pages:

```
// backLinkSection.js

import React from 'react';
import NextLink from './NextLink';

const BacklinksSection = ({pagesLinkingBackTo}) => {
	if (!pagesLinkingBackTo) return <></>
	return (
		<aside>
			<h4>
				Pages referencing this post:
				<ul>

				{pagesLinkingBackTo.map(link => (
					<li><NextLink href={link.slug}>{link.title}</NextLink> </li>
				))}
				</ul>
			</h4>
		</aside>
	);
};

export default BacklinksSection;
```

Assuming I haven't link to this page yet, you can see this in action at the bottom of my [Parsing Mardkown in Node](/parsemd) post. Now with handy links to click and explore related topics.

I'm excited to keep tending the garden! I've already seen themes emerge through the regular tags I use. Here's to a great harvest someday!

Generating Back Links For Optimal Digital Gardening

Jimmy Van Heusen – Polka Dots and Moonbeams


![🌱](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/pratchettonenglishgardens.jpg)

I revisited a passage from Sir Terry Pratchett's ["A Slip of the Keyboard."](https://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/books/a-slip-of-the-keyboard/) The essay "Magic Kingdoms" illustrates the English dedication to maintaining a garden in any environment. Pratchett uses this as an exemplification for how the garden is a portal to another world, and a widespread fascination with planting a garden is why fantasy is part of the fabric of the culture. 

> I remember a back garden I used to see from the train. It was a very small garden for a very small house, and it was sandwiched between the thundering railway line, a billboard, and a near-derelict factory.
> 
> I don't know what a Frenchman or an Italian would have made of it. A terrace, probably, with a few potted plants and some trellis to conceal the worst of postindustrial squalor. But this was an Englishman's garden, so he'd set out to grow, if not Jerusalem, then at least Jerusalem artichokes. There was a rockery, made of carefully placed concrete lumps (the concrete lump rockery is a great British contribution to horticulture, and I hope one is preserved in some outdoor museum somewhere) There was a pond; the fish probably had to get out to turn around. There were roses. There was a tiny greenhouse made of old window frames nailed together (another great British invention). Never was an area so thoroughly gardened, in fact, as that patch of cat infested soil. 
> 
> No attempt had been made to screen off the dark satanic mills, unless the runner beans counted. To the gardener, in the garden, they did not exist. They were in another world. 

For me there's another comfort in the scene. Even if we're not nurturing plants, we all have the means to cultivate our own creative gardens. A sketchbook, journal, blog, a song. And it doesn't matter how humble! A jar of soil and basil goes a long way for bringing life to a space. So it is with strumming strings and moving the pencil.



Pratchett on English Gardens


That equation feels right.

This comes from the legendary Disney animator and teacher Walt Stanchfield (A lead character animator for the Aristocats, to name one.) I've written before about how Walt Describes [the curious act of performing with no audience](/stanchfield). This equation come in context from [his handouts for gesture drawing](https://ia601302.us.archive.org/15/items/Gesture_Drawing_for_Animation/Gesture_Drawing_for_Animation.pdf):

(Here, Walt is talking about the benefits of staying healthy enough to have the energy to create, another juicy point)

> You must create. The injunction of life is to create or perish. Good physical and mental
> conditioning are necessary to do this. Remember this: the creative energy that created the
> Universe, created you and its creative power is in you now, motivating you, urging you on -
> always in the direction of creative expression. I have a formula: "Impression minus expression
> equals depression". This is especially applicable to artists. We have trained ourselves to be
> impressed (aware) of all the things around us, and in the natural course of our lives those
> impressions cry out to be expressed - on paper, on canvas, in music, in poetry, in an
> animated film. So shape up.

Ain't that the truth?

It's still worth the reminder. When you do professionally creative work (like animation or software!) you are still constantly taking in the world and are falling in love with all sorts of things - books, music, stories, and technologies.

The best way to express that love is through getting down to business and making something.


Impression Minus Expression Equals Depression


I don't always find the inspiration I'm looking for from the bios and stories of full time artists. Those select few who can spend most of their week in the studio. Winston Churchill, who was surprisingly an enthusiastic, self proclaimed hobby painter, can speak much more clearly to the situation of having to find time to be creative in the nooks and crannies of the day.

![And a surprisingly sensitive painter, at that!!](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/images/churchillpainting_Large.jpg)

I've been rattling in my mind all the different reasons I like drawing/piano/guitar/writing music/blogging, and why someone else might like to do them too.

To Churchill, it was no contest comparing painting to more typical leisure activities:

> Even at the advanced age of Forty! It would be a sad pity to shuffle or scramble along through one's playtime with golf and bridge, pottering, loitering, shifting from one heel to the other, wondering what on earth to do – as perhaps is the fate of some unhappy beings – when all the while, if you only knew, there is close at hand a wonderful new world of thought and craft, a sunlit garden gleaming with light and colour of which you have the key in your waistcoat pocket. Inexpensive independence, a mobile and perennial pleasure apparatus, new mental food and exercise, the old harmonies and symmetries in an entirely different language, an added interest to every common scene, an occupation for every idle hour, an unceasing voyage of entrancing discovery – these are high prizes.

A particularly sobering passage acknowledges that, as a hobbyist, you won't reach the same great heights of technique as the life-long, full time painters. It's a problem I find myself wrestling with frequently, but Churchill brings it up so matter-of-factly and without much concern:

> But if, on the contrary, you are inclined – late in life though it be – to reconnoitre a foreign sphere of limitless extent, then be persuaded that the first quality that is needed is Audacity. There really is no time for the deliberate approach. Two years of drawing-lessons, three years of copying woodcuts, five years of plaster casts – these are for the young. They have enough time to bear. And this thorough grounding is for those who, hearing the call in the morning of their days, are able to make painting their paramount lifelong vocation. The truth and beauty of line and form which by the slightest touch or twist of the brush a real artist imparts to every feature of his design must be founded on long, hard, persevering apprenticeship and a practice so habitual that it has become instinctive. We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paintbox. And for this Audacity is the only ticket.

![These trees ❤️](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/images/winston-churchill-art-collection-pr-0518-1600x800.jpg)

It's still worth the pursuit all the same. The rewards for that Audacity are many:

> I have written in this way to show how varied are the delights which may be gained by those who enter hopefully and thoughtfully upon the pathway of painting; how enriched they will be in their daily vision, how fortified in their independence, how happy in their leisure. Whether you feel that your soul is pleased by the conceptions or contemplation of harmonies, or that your mind is stimulated by the aspect of magnificent problems, or whether you are content to find fun in trying to observe and depict the jolly things you see, the vistas of possibility are limited only by the shortness of life. Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.

So beautifully said. It all rings true for me:

- Playing with shapes and sound, their interaction with one another, is fun unto itself
- Creation is largely puzzle solving. Even playing piano is a finger puzzle
- There's no better way to express love for the world than to try to recapture it as you see it
- Progress, itself, is a joy! Learning an instrument more intimately or refining a line stroke, they all lead to small victories
- There are infinite paths to explore. None right or wrong, only guided by your curiosity and interest

And why wait? The time to plant a garden is now:

> Try it, then, before it is too late and before you mock at me. Try it while there is time to overcome the preliminary difficulties. Learn enough of the language in your prime to open this new literature to your age. Plant a garden in which you can sit when digging days are done. It may be only a small garden, but you will see it grow. Year by year it will bloom and ripen. Year by year it will be better cultivated. The weeds will be cast out. The fruit-trees will be pruned and trained. The flowers will bloom in more beautiful combinations. There will be sunshine there even in the winter-time, and cool shade, and the play of shadow on the pathway in the shining days of June.

While the earlier, the better for overcoming the initial hurdle of learning the vocabulary, it's never too late. Thankfully, the barrier to entry is not technique or years of experience. Just Audacity!

![☁️](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/images/churchillpainting.jpg)


Winston Churchill on Painting as a Pastime

Phone Lines

Goose Creek

Hike

Cloud Covered Mountains

Cycling

⋆.˚🐠‧₊ _Frutiger Aero inspired music!_ ˚✩ ₊˚🫧⊹♡

Late 2000s tech had a unique vibrancy that made it feel almost magical. A new wave of color and light, glowing portals that illuminated worlds imagined and real. It was truly alive, how you interacted with it was so novel. More intuitive than ever before.

The anticipation for this promised future was at it's strongest as you began to load up that new system you brought home. Powering it on. Walking through the startup process. Being greeted to something wholly new...

SkyBox

Installation

Mostly Sunny

Cool guitar driven music for hot summer days.

Largely inspired by the great Masayoshi Takanaka.

Snow Cones

Watermelon

Raspberry

Collectathon Island's magical power-orbs have been scattered all over the place! We need a lovable 3D anthropomorphic mascot to use their signature jumping and running abilities to return them all.

Inspired by Richard Jacques, David Wise, and countless summers playing platformers.

Jam 3D

Collectathon Island

Bonus Stage Dimension

Video Game inspired Drum and Bass! Influenced by Soichi Terada and Jun Chikuma.

Space Cowboy Forrest Frog pilots his galaxy F-5 aircraft in search of the Hyper Fragment — a now rare material used to power warp speed travel. A group called the Black Hole Herons has aggressively taken control over the mines in the Lake Lenticular Galaxy, and there's only one gunman for the job!

Space Frog 64

Lily Pad Sector

Hyper Fragment


Blogs are bad at goodbyes and intermissions.

Part of the loveliness is that there are no chapters like a book, no page count to adhere to. They can go on and on. But we're all folks who generally like closures and order.

A week ago marked 5 years of this blog going live. Though the themes and practices around it have been in the works for 7 years since 2019. At the time, I was itching to explore new mediums, searching for a more authentic voice, and ready to start contributing my piece after years of taking influence from so many sources. So I began! I wrote music, picked up new instruments, went pro on software work, and was soon putting words on the internet. 

Through the process of working on this dot com stage, I had real fuel to continually find the answer to what it was I wanted to make and share. Largely, it's been a mailbox full of love letters: to musicians, developers, writers, and artists. You end up learning to see these things more closely when trying to imitate and remix. And so I've had many years to deconstruct the inner workings of all sorts of genres and media.

In my mind, I was reaching for destinations. I have so many peers who adore traveling. I like to think this is my version of it. Going behind the scenes of these practices, getting a tactile understanding of what the process looks like. Overly romantic, maybe, but true all the same.

The more broadly I traveled, though, the more I realized that the sensations: flow state, inspiration, study, craft. These weren't mutually exclusive to any individual practice. The constellation made it clear that the cliché is correct — what you end up searching for has been here all along.

Not only that, but after 7 years of devoted work, it turns out I've reached where I was aiming to go. There's always more to learn, of course, and no one ever fully arrives. But I've gradually gone from "It would be great to paint something like this" to "Hey, I've painted something like this!"

It's that duality of a rewarding sensation from reaching the top of a mountain, and then wondering, a bit nervously, "What next?"

---

All this to say I'm at a chapter's end. 

I'll be considering myself on hiatus from this site. No current plan or intent one way or the other on returning. To be determined. I'll be taking the time to see what comes up next. 

Many of the ideas that made it here were born during a stretch of time when I wasn't working on a major body of creative output. Closing out the site for a while is not saying no to meaningful work, but saying yes to the silence that allows for more to come through.

It's not seen as much on here, but I'm also more interested in the sketches, drawn or otherwise. Any online bucket builds up expectation. There's the quiet thought, even if it's self-imposed, to rip through another finished piece. The pause is to help start fresh and see what blooms naturally.

A big motivator of all creative practices, including the blog, has been a desire to capture life in a way that the beauty grabs even a fraction of the inspiration. And so what if the most creative work is in how we choose to live our days and be with them?  As much as I adore all of these media: written, aural, and visual, they all pale in comparison to the lived experience. Perhaps it’s time to stop assuming that these feelings are only really had on the other side of a detailed rendering, a sweet phrasing of a melody, or finding the perfect word. It’s already here, and it always has been.

I’m a big believer in an idea that has developed from all of this work. That life is richer when reflected on. That won’t be going away from my routine; there’s still plenty of room for sketchbooks, journals, and other private means of doing all that. The pause is here online.
 
So who knows. Maybe a hiatus. Maybe a week, maybe a year. Maybe the end of the book on this particular project. It’s not so much about giving up on a site, an app, a painting, a project. So long as we’re still guided by curiosity, enthusiasm, and whatever is authentic. It doesn’t entirely matter what the canvas is, or how large it is, or how many rooms you can fill with paintings.

Well, we'll see. For now — *Au revoir!*

Chapter's End


A curious thing about AI apps, given that there is minimal UI, and that largely the UI of an AI app is through text, is that from a user standpoint in this new world, it’s not clear what the business app is, and what the AI technology is. At the very least, it’s easy to conflate the two if you’re unfamiliar. The LLM, vendor, be it OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini. And the logic that sits on top that makes it work to accomplish whatever business-specific goal needs accomplishing.

An interesting illustration for this would be looking at the difference between LangGraph and LangChain’s ReAct Agent.

The LangChain Reacts Agent is a quick wiring up of a few different things. A system, prompt, which guides the vendor’s LLM on what is trying to be accomplished. A series of tools, typically API interactions that the LLM can invoke if needed. And then the user prompt, of course. The actual input provided by your user.

In LangGraph, unless you use this package, you don’t have access to this. What you’re doing instead is creating a series of nodes, edges, and logic, for how to incorporate all these pieces.

As an example, say I want to know how the Houston Astros are doing during their game today. I ask my Astros AI app if there’s a game going on, and what the current score is.

Here’s what needs to happen. This is all hypothetical, so we’ll walk through a few scenarios of how this could move around. My message is received by the application, let’s say the application is built with LangGraph. We may want to decipher the intent of the message, one way or another. Say that this AI is responsible for a number of things, sports scores for the Astros only being one of them. We may have our first node triaging what the question is that’s being asked. Once we ascertain that it’s about the score for the Astros, we can pass this along to the appropriate node for this. It’s best that we give each node individual responsibilities, in the same way that we have classes and components in our code bases individual responsibilities. Worth noting that we can have parent and child relationships here as well. Nodes can contain graphs within them.

It gets tricky from here to have an example, because much of how we structure this is partly dependent on the supporting API. Let’s assume that I have an endpoint where I can simply pass in a sports team and a date of a game — getting a score back. Once we’ve brought these details our score node, I can then call the appropriate API. This is either accomplished manually there, by extracting the team at a previous point, and then passing it to my API, or it is provided as a tool when we insert a React agent.

Once I get the score back, then I want to generate a human-readable message from the JSON. Perhaps there’s a separate node specifically for this once we have all the pertinent details. We navigate to that node, and another LLM is responsible for receiving a prompt specifically for turning the information we’ve gathered into a human-readable message. This could be a single-shot or a multi-shot interaction. Perhaps we generate an initial message as a draft, and then we clean it up with any communication policies. It’s at this point that we can then send the information off.

It gets more sophisticated from here. Say that the user includes multiple requests within one message. There’s been a need for an iterative approach to this. Perhaps a paragraph is responsible for creating a to-do list based on the user’s input, and then cycling through indications of notes and subgraphs to check off each item on the list. And then a summarizing message can be formed and cleaned up at the end.

A great deal of piping! But the development work doesn’t stop there. Given that these applications are famously non-deterministic, the amount of testing that goes into building these is high. There’s automated testing that can be done: unit, integration, graph traversal. For LLM-generated responses, evals will need to be put into place, and even so, these need manual review and iteration to match tone and catch hallucination.

In the same swoop that AI assistant coding tools are becoming really sophisticated, so is the bar for the AI applications that we’re developing. The point of all this being that, even in what seems like simple requests, there’s still a heavy amount of engineering and iteration to get to these places. Some would argue that it turns out that the LLM is not actually the most interesting part. It’s the many ways that we can develop an application on top of these. Much like any typical backend feature, a great deal of magic to the user, an interesting puzzle to all the teams that are bringing these new features to life.


AI Feature Application Layer


![Sketch of Vivi from FFIX on the piano keyboard, with a duck trinket nearby.](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/images/ViviSketch.png)

Started playing a bit of FFIX the other day. Vivi is too sweet.


Vivi Sketch


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🐴


I Ride an Old Paint


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[Revisiting this one](/lisztliebestraum3arr). _So romantic._


Liszt – Liebestraum No 3 (arranged) Revisited


<figure>
  ![Sheets strewn about with construction studies of an amp and many other everyday objects.](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/images/AmpConstruction.png)
  <figcaption>Studies!</figcaption>
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Construction studies while working through [Draw A Box](https://drawabox.com/). I remember these looking pretty intimidating with all of the different additional lines to measure out the form. Not as bad once you get into the groove. Nice to have some pattern matching, feels similar to programming, even! 🤘


Hey, I'm Chris!

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