I love the idea of using a shared event log for coordination. Smart!
I have a Symphony-style[1] factory, which keeps all the context in a single session, but I want to start splitting into stations with separate sessions, and I hadn’t worked out how to do communication between sessions.
Really cool to see JSON Canvas getting attention. (Hi, kepano!) It was one of the inspirations for OCIF (Open Canvas Interchange Format), which we've been working on since JSON Canvas came out.
JSON Canvas nails the simplicity-it's easy to read and easy to implement. We wanted to build on that spirit while tackling some of the challenges showing up in this thread: nested canvases, extensibility for custom app data, text styling, coordinate systems, and round-tripping between different canvas apps without data loss.
OCIF v0.7.0 just came out. It's designed to be an interchange format — so different canvas tools (Excalidraw, TLDraw, Obsidian, etc.) can export/import each other's canvases.
Some highlights:
- Extensible: apps can attach their own data via extensions, so nothing gets lost even if the features aren't supported
- Nested canvases via parent-child node relationships
- Local coordinate systems (addresses the pixel positioning concerns raised in another comment here)
- Text styling, viewport control, and more via built-in extensions
If JSON Canvas isn't quite meeting your needs, OCIF[1] might be worth a look.
I wonder if this is just a byproduct of factories being very early and very inefficient. Yegge and Huntley both acknowledge that their experiments in autonomous factories are extremely expensive and wasteful!
I would expect cost to come down over time, using approaches pioneered in the field of manufacturing.
For those of us working on building factories, this is pretty obvious because once you immediately need shared context across agents / sessions and an improved ID + permissions system to keep track of who is doing what.
I’ve been building using a similar approach[1] and my intuition is that humans will be needed at some points in the factory line for specific tasks that require expertise/taste/quality. Have you found that the be the case? Where do you find that humans should be involved in the process of maximal leverage?
To name one probable area of involvement: how do you specify what needs to be built?
This! It’s both-and. Literacy has been undeniably good, but we rarely consider the consequences of widespread literacy.
There’s a way of knowing something that can be recalled orally from memory that is different and valuable. But we even measure it using a yardstick for written knowledge (accuracy, breadth, etc).
I believe this overemphasis on written knowledge (really, it’s implicitly a denial that any other type exists) is part of what drives the hysteria about LLMs ending the world. LLM doomerism has to believe that written knowledge is at least the most important if not the only necessary form of knowledge.