For a project of this magnitude, it would be pretty damn foolish not to have some goals for what I’d like to get out of a stateful agent. I am building this out of curiosity, but I’d really like it to work and make my life easier.

I think the first thing is helping me become more competitive, and increase visibility. While it’s been a slow build, I am sure I am missing things simply because I don’t have the time to do the research.

Next, and probably even more important, is to stop losing money. I’m finding that I have more often than not ended up with a margin in the single digits after expenses. Even after I think I am making good money. Having an extra eye there will help too.

Finally, getting more organized is another important part. Nobody wants to wait for their order, and I procrastinate way more than I should. Having a nag there will improve customer experience.

So if I had to pick three reasons for Hal, it’s competitiveness, profitability, and organization. Hopefully, I manage to build something worthwhile.

Figured starting this blog with a little bit more about myself is a good starting point. My name is Ed Oswald, and for much of the past three decades, I’ve covered technology news for a variety of publications, including BetaNews, PC World, and Digital Trends, to name a few.

My “beat” for much of the last decade or so has been on emerging technologies, so I’ve been tinkering with AI since the early days of ChatGPT.

A coder I am certainly not: to be honest, my coding capabilities above and beyond HTML and CSS are truthfully stuck in the early 2000s (ASP.NET, anyone?). But as models began to code with increasing accuracy, it was too attractive not to join in.

Like a lot of people “vibe coding” right now, I had great ideas in my head, but not the technical expertise to implement them. However, being in tech as long as I have, I know that poorly written software can lead to lots of problems later, so I still use the same development techniques: iterative spec-driven development and so on, that somebody writing the code would.

No YOLO here, I want this to work.

Given my background in writing, I have taken a more specific interest in the ways humans communicate with AI, including user interfaces. So you can bet that anything I built using AI will have good UI.

Thanks for coming along for the journey.