Nine months ago I published an Initial Prospectus. I had just left Google, I’d started a studio with no fixed destination, and I laid out a long list of things I wanted to chase: AI, radio, music, writing, art, cybernetics, and a good handful more. I admitted the list might read like a scatter of puzzle pieces with no picture on the box, and I asked you to trust that they cohered, that they shared a common theme of “Andy-ness” you might come to recognize. This is the update I promised. The pieces are starting to form a picture, and now I can show you instead of asking.
Three of those threads have become things you can actually hold. The interactive-writing thread, aimed squarely at the parser games I grew up on, became Foyer, an interactive fiction player for iOS. The music thread, plus an old itch left over from my internet-radio days at Live365, became downtempo, a discovery hub for the downtempo genre. And the AI thread became a working protocol that lets software agents book services on our behalf, an open standard I’ll introduce here by name when it launches in the coming weeks.
A fourth thread never needed to become a project. It just accumulated. Over these months I’ve published essays on how AI gathers its training data, on using an artist’s eye to read emerging technology trends, and on why single-purpose devices still earn their place in a phone-shaped world. That part of the studio was working from day one, and it’s where a lot of the thinking behind the other three happened first, in public.
The rest of the original list hasn’t gone anywhere. Wine, vintage computing, radio, and the longer tail of interests are all still here: some as quiet notebooks, some as early experiments, some that may never leave the workshop. (Or not. I left that door open last time, and I’m keeping it open.)
What’s clearer now is the seam all of it sits on. Whatever I’m building, it lives where a technology meets the people using it, and the test is the one I set the first time: not whether the thing is clever, but whether people come out the far side of it more connected, and more themselves. The method hasn’t changed either. I build in the open, I document as I go, and I share the results here and on the mailing list.
The full statement of purpose, the reasoning behind the studio, and the story behind the name still live in the original prospectus. Consider this the report from nine months down the road, with more arriving soon.