Sam Folorunsho

Exploring AI memory; I want to help humans remember more. Building in public and writing about it.

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

I've been building Tribal, a memory system that stores tacit engineering knowledge as you work and makes it queryable across your team.

My taste for hyper-configurable systems comes from a previous job, where bank operators configured the system in Python themselves.

I brought that instinct to my own project; when sketching the first config schema, I reflexively made the embedding model as configurable as the inference model. In a config file, they look like the same kind of setting.

They are not the same thing.

Swap your inference model and nothing you've already stored notices. Swap your embedding model and none of it can be searched until every last record is rebuilt.

The new post is about that gap: how a small promise about a system's behaviour can cost far more to keep than it did to make.

Keeping this one meant implementing zero-downtime migration - rebuilding everything underneath a live system without anyone feeling it shift

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[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

https://t.co/z8GUaKzgae

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@mattshumer_ I expect the next wave of tech to be super polished - everyone will

What's going to happen to the scrappy MVP?

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

Today it's all about Arxiv papers - I have a backlog I've been meaning to catch up on.

First up:

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@MarkoCirix Nice; must feel like a relief!

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@levelsio This app has really, really changed over the years.

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@souvikdeb26 Fascinating

What's the wedge between this and Wispr/Willow etc?

Voice is tough; kudos!

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@FactoryAI @FireworksAI_HQ Absolutely loved the talk at AI Engineer about Missions - super creative 🏆

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@DanielSmidstrup The doorman fallacy - AI replaces tasks not jobs

Hiring juniors is a great way to mold seniors who deeply understand the problems that matter to your organisation

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@SaiyamPathak Same; everything feels so urgent these days!

Can’t remember the last time I felt compelled to take my time with a project

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@simonw Handling the agent gateway for a managed service; Fable’s helping to harden the effort-unit-based billing journeys

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@0xV0LYX @omarsar0 I wonder about this; eventually it'll be useful to share or consolidate memories - if they all create their own schema on the fly, it would be difficult to share learnings

I'd lean toward a standard, however loose

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@omarsar0 Absolutely; was thinking about this the other day; how would one decide which memories are worth keeping over time?

Parsing a transcript, or instance, a financial system may focus on financial data, ignoring other details - same wouldn't be said about a lead qualification system

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@ms_aifrontiers @adamfourney Such a relevant library 🥂

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@OwenDigitals Nope; all Rust and Postgres at the moment:
https://t.co/JPCvyO8Uzj

Yourself?

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

I hope they still do Advent of Code in December... I still look forward to it.

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

@astra_095 @X Awesome; returned - good luck!

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

Since then, comments have been far leaner and the review loops go on far longer without my intervention, all whilst maintaining my personal code quality bar.

That's it; that's the post 🥂

Anyone do anything similar?

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

💡 Anti-slop tip for those building dark factories:

[Sam Folorunsho @samvfolo]

It occurred to me I could lean on good old code quality techniques here, so eventually I added this:

"The urge to write or lengthen a comment is a signal to try the code first: rename the value so the meaning rides the name, extract the block into a function whose name carries the why, lift the invariant into a type or an assertion.

"Prose is the fallback for what code structurally cannot say: the outside constraint, the non-obvious why, never a patch over a name that failed to say it.

"A comment that grows under review is the sharpest case: each round's added explanation is a fact looking for a home in the code, and the comment should shrink as the code absorbs it, never lengthen to defend it."