Somebody has to imagine the future. I’d rather build it and live in it.

I use science fiction, speculative design and vibe-coding to imagine daily life with thinking machines — then I build working systems and live with them until the fiction stops being fiction.

This page is the story of what happens when you take that seriously. Six chapters. Every one of them ships.

the digital body — drag to rotate, scroll to zoom, click a node

The story so far

Every system I build starts the same way: as a scene from a life that doesn’t quite exist yet. I write the scene down, then I refuse to let it stay fiction. What follows are six of those scenes — and the working software each one became.

Ten seconds of judgment, delivered to the right doorstep

The machines got capable first and wise second — that was always going to be the order. So the scarce resource in your day quietly changed: not typing, not knowledge, but the moment of judgment only you can supply. Somewhere an agent hits a fork — two roads, both defensible — and the old kind would guess and let you discover the wrong turn an hour later.

The new kind knocks. A small panel at the edge of the screen: one question, three options, your ten seconds. You answer, it vanishes, the work continues on the road you chose. Being interrupted stopped being a cost. It became the job.

That knock exists. It's called Cenno — a native macOS surface where agents queue their questions — a decision to confirm, a rating, a pick from options — and structured answers flow straight back into the agent loop. Built on one principle: an agent should ask before it assumes.

Cenno — The agent asks before it assumes

Cenno

The agent asks before it assumes

cenno.salient.community →
···

The darkroom where machines learn your eye

Overnight the machines painted four hundred pictures. This is not the miracle it sounds like — abundance is cheap now. The miracle would be knowing, quickly and honestly, which three deserve to exist in public. Generation scaled; taste didn't.

So taste gets a darkroom. You rate a batch over coffee; visually similar frames cluster so you judge families, not files; smart collections quietly gather everything that matches what you've already said yes to. The keepers surface. The rest becomes compost without ceremony.

The darkroom is Cull — a library where AI-art generations get reviewed and turned into something — ratings and shortlists, visual similarity search, smart collections that learn your criteria, then export and publishing for the images that earn it.

Cull — Curate an AI-art library, then publish it

Cull

Curate an AI-art library, then publish it

cull.company →
···

Write the procedure once, and every agent inherits it

There was a time when you taught the same lesson to every new colleague: how to run a pre-mortem, how to mine a decade of notes for a connection nobody saw, how to compile a design system from tokens. Then colleagues became agents, and something strange became possible — expertise you could hand over as a file.

Now when you solve a problem well, you write the solution down as a drawer in a public cabinet. Any agent — yours, mine, a stranger's — opens the drawer and suddenly knows how. Teaching happens once. Inheritance is instant and infinite.

The cabinet is public. It's Agent Skills — an open collection of Claude skills — a decision toolkit with bias checks, vault daydreaming, deep research, session analysis, design tokens and more. Written procedures that any agent can pick up and use.

Agent Skills — Open procedures for agents

Agent Skills

Open procedures for agents

skills.salient.community →
···

A night shift that reviews its own work

The word factory used to mean repetition. This one means discipline. At 23:40 you write a spec in plain language and go to bed. In the dark, agents pick it up, build, argue — one writes, another reviews, tests gate every door. Nothing ships because a machine felt confident; things ship because they passed.

Morning brings a changelog written for humans, like mail from a diligent colleague who happens not to sleep. The trick was never letting the machines improvise: four fifths of the factory is deterministic scaffolding, and the intelligence is spent only where judgment is genuinely needed.

That factory runs my products today. It's the Release Factory — agentic release infrastructure behind everything on this page — specs go in, reviewed, tested, versioned releases come out. 80% deterministic pipeline, 20% AI routing, human sign-off where it matters.

Release Factory — Specs in, shipped releases out

Release Factory

Specs in, shipped releases out

github.com/glebis →
···

The room that breathes with your heart

The machines learned to ask, to judge, to ship. Then they learned to listen to the body. You strap on a heart monitor and the room tunes itself to you: lights ripple with every beat, chords stay warm while you're calm and drift dissonant when stress creeps in, a garden on the screen grows vines only from sustained coherence — and remembers the session.

Then a second person puts on a strap, and the strangest instrument appears: two hearts as orbiting moons that slowly phase-lock, an aurora that smooths itself the moment you sync. Nobody is performing. The music is what being together sounds like.

That room runs on my desk. It's Ribbon — a biofeedback system streaming ECG at 130 Hz from a Polar H10 strap — live HRV and coherence drive Philips Hue ripples, a physical desk LED, and eleven browser instruments in Three.js and WebAudio, from a breathing pacer to a Bach-inspired generative suite. Multiplayer included.

Ribbon — Heart → light → sound, in real time

Ribbon

Heart → light → sound, in real time

github.com/glebis →
···

A community engine that starts from not-knowing

And once one person can ship like a team, the question turns outward: what could a hundred people be to each other, if the room did the remembering? Most community platforms are filing cabinets with chat attached. Imagine instead a room that listens — notices which conversations matter, surfaces the member who asked your exact question last spring, lets the group's memory compound instead of scrolling away.

The engine never claims to understand you. It starts from not-knowing — holds its models of people lightly, asks instead of profiling — and that epistemic humility is precisely why it gets better.

The room is being built at unknowing.community — an experimental community engine — infrastructure where collective memory, introductions, and salience are handled by agents, so humans can spend their attention on each other.

unknowing.community — Experimental community engine

unknowing.community

Experimental community engine

unknowing.community →

Meanwhile, on the workbench

Not everything gets a chapter. Some things exist because the tools were lying around and the itch wouldn’t go away — instruments, workstations, benchmarks. All real, all in use.

Instrument

Bandmaskin

A rack of virtual reel-to-reel tape machines with physically simulated tape: brake it with a finger, pull it to bend pitch, clip felt and foil onto the ribbon and hear them pass the head. A wear mode disintegrates the loop a little on every pass, Frippertronics-style. The MacBook trackpad becomes a ten-finger performance surface.

Rhythm Landscape v3 · Web Audio + physics simulation

Workstation

i18n Studio

A localization workbench for real codebases. Saves touch only the one string you edited — AST-level, zero formatting churn. Edit a phrase once and propagate it to every duplicate across the corpus; review translations keyboard-first at 3 candidates per string, no separate API key needed.

v0.3 · works against any repo · ts-morph + Claude

Benchmark

CONFIDE

An open, local-first toolkit for de-identifying therapy transcripts — and a red team that attacks its own anonymizer to see what leaks. Benchmarked on 30 synthetic sessions with 1,076 gold PII mentions, scoring harm-weighted recall, because a missed leak is the real failure.

open source · regex → NER → local LLM · GDPR attack taxonomy

I imagine how daily life will feel when the tech catches up. Then I build it and live with it now.

Working prototypes, not concept renders. Childhood sci-fi never left — it just changed medium. Every chapter above followed the same three moves.

Prototype the future

If you can’t use it daily, it’s not real yet. The fiction earns its keep the day it compiles.

Live with it

The real question isn’t “what can this AI do?” but “what happens when a person and an AI live together for months?”

Digital body, not second brain

Memory + tools + agency + senses. An organism, not a tool. The projects above are its organs.

Things I shipped and slept next to

The story didn’t start with agents. It started twenty-five years ago, with the habit of building whatever I couldn’t stop thinking about.

2001

Started building — twenty-five years in IT, most of it hands-on. Later: CPO Ozon.travel, Chief of Content Ostrovok, Tsentsiper.

2022

First AI labs — began teaching knowledge management and AI agents. 350+ practitioners since.

2024

AGENCY community — ~150 builders arguing about how AI should actually work. Tool Building Ape channel grows past 1,800.

2024–25

Personal OS — audio-monitor, Verity (Telegram agent), Decision Toolkit, Vault Daydream — the digital body assembles, organ by organ.

2026

Cull & Cenno — research projects on GitHub: judgment for AI images, questions before assumptions.

2026

Release Factory, Ribbon & unknowing.community — the infrastructure ships itself; the desk lights beat with a heart; the community engine begins to listen.

Where the story becomes teachable

The hard part of working with AI isn’t technical — it’s unlearning what you think is impossible. Week one: “I can’t code.” Week four: shipping working products. Over 350 people have gone through my labs, and most of them aren’t developers.

Salience

8 weeks building your own Personal OS — agents running on your data, memory, and context. Telegram agents, voice interfaces, data lakes, skills, MCP.

Cohort 1, March 2026 · live + async · 180+ active members

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Claude Code Lab

7 weeks using Claude Code as your AI workhorse: agents, MCP & skills, deployment, real products. Most participants aren't developers.

Next cohort April 2026 · Zoom, Mon & Wed · 100+ alumni

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Goal-Driven Design

A cohort crash course in designing with AI — judgment first, tools second. Build work that is unmistakably yours.

Starts July 20 · 8–15 builders · with Yulia Katan

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“There’s simply no boundary anymore of what you can’t do.”

— Mikhail, lab participant

Nobody imagines the future alone

The labs produced something I didn’t plan for: rooms full of people who kept building after the sessions ended. These are the rooms.