September 22, 2026
SIG-P4B 2026-09-22
Participants: rafa (UTC+1), Sachin, doxxed_as_zak, Eric Alston (UTC - 6), PAtwater
This session was part of an AI/vibe-coding workshop in which participants demonstrated and discussed self-built software tools. rafa demonstrated a distributed robot-hiring/contracting project and a teleoperated robot, then rafa and Sachin worked through their emerging vocabulary for what they call "factories" (personal, protocolized AI-enabled software that isn't quite a product). The conversation broadened into a recurring theme raised by doxxed_as_zak — the lack of shared language across tools and projects (a "Tower of Babel" problem) — before turning to logistics for an afternoon show-and-tell session and a closing exchange with Eric Alston on how "writing for an external audience" improves both human and AI output.
- rafa demonstrated Yak Robot (yakrobot.com): distributed robot hiring/contracting on blockchain rails. A person submits an RFP/task in English, it's converted to machine-readable tasks, robots review against their capabilities, bid, win, get paid, execute, and return data. rafa said this "works ish" on mainnet.
- rafa is also building an LLM data pipeline that converts English PDFs into machine-readable robot tasks (e.g. "take the beer out of the fridge" → specific location/action).
- rafa distinguishes a "factory" from a product/platform: it's a heavily protocolized process built for oneself or friends, not for commercial scale. Framing something as a "product" pulls you into a different design paradigm.
- Sachin: a factory is essentially "an extension of a single person" — embodied skills turned into software that can run without them, plus affordances like automation, densification, and bespoke creation (concepts from the prior day).
- rafa: these are objects that "shouldn't exist" under the old paradigm — previously not cost-effective in time, money, or skill, now possible. They're more than a toy, hardened enough to build a life/community on, but not at scale and not quite open-source software.
- doxxed_as_zak likened this to the 1980s home-electronics/component-store movement — hobbyist building that later disappeared as products matured.
Session Recording Summary · 52m 45s · Full notes ↗
Reading: Not clearly identified in the discussion. This session was a working/demo session of a "KitKraft" workshop (part of a recurring special interest group) rather than a discussion of a specific text. References were made to prior sessions, a "water data" project presented by Maxwell, and a "psycho history" special interest group that reads history books.
This session was part of an AI/vibe-coding workshop in which participants demonstrated and discussed self-built software tools. rafa demonstrated a distributed robot-hiring/contracting project and a teleoperated robot, then rafa and Sachin worked through their emerging vocabulary for what they call "factories" (personal, protocolized AI-enabled software that isn't quite a product). The conversation broadened into a recurring theme raised by doxxed_as_zak — the lack of shared language across tools and projects (a "Tower of Babel" problem) — before turning to logistics for an afternoon show-and-tell session and a closing exchange with Eric Alston on how "writing for an external audience" improves both human and AI output.
- rafa demonstrated Yak Robot (yakrobot.com): distributed robot hiring/contracting on blockchain rails. A person submits an RFP/task in English, it's converted to machine-readable tasks, robots review against their capabilities, bid, win, get paid, execute, and return data. rafa said this "works ish" on mainnet.
- rafa is also building an LLM data pipeline that converts English PDFs into machine-readable robot tasks (e.g. "take the beer out of the fridge" → specific location/action).
- rafa distinguishes a "factory" from a product/platform: it's a heavily protocolized process built for oneself or friends, not for commercial scale. Framing something as a "product" pulls you into a different design paradigm.
- Sachin: a factory is essentially "an extension of a single person" — embodied skills turned into software that can run without them, plus affordances like automation, densification, and bespoke creation (concepts from the prior day).
- rafa: these are objects that "shouldn't exist" under the old paradigm — previously not cost-effective in time, money, or skill, now possible. They're more than a toy, hardened enough to build a life/community on, but not at scale and not quite open-source software.
- doxxed_as_zak likened this to the 1980s home-electronics/component-store movement — hobbyist building that later disappeared as products matured.
Questions & Disagreements: - doxxed_as_zak's open question: "Will we apply domain-driven design to language itself?" — asking whether/how a shared or "parent" domain language for software can emerge. rafa flagged it as important and unsolved, betting on a decade of mess before convergence. No resolution. - doxxed_as_zak initially questioned rafa's use of "factory" for what looked like just remote-control software; rafa …
Participants: rafa (UTC+1), Sachin, doxxed_as_zak, Eric Alston (UTC - 6), PAtwater