The complete Tiny Shakespeare baseline as an instrument: diagnostics, curve, checkpoint, and one revealing broken specimen.

Pre-LN, identity gradients, residual initialization, and why a block is two writes into one persistent stream.

From a loop mean to scaled causal self-attention, following every tensor shape through the implementation.

A shifted batch, 4,096 simultaneous next-character bets, and the first numerical check that tells me whether the model is alive.

PicGen Studio now has Prompt Examples that fill prompts with one click, and a proper ‘Add Reference’ button that lets you upload local images or pick from history. No more staring at a blank input box.

PicGen’s image generation used to be a simple form: type a prompt, get an image. I just shipped a Studio that turns the whole experience into a ChatGPT-like conversation — where you talk to an AI artist, iterate on images, and build a creative thread.

What started as a simple Docker rebuild turned into a full-day adventure — fighting uv venv permissions, freeing 13GB of disk, and debugging a Cloudflare Turnstile secret that refused to work.

First post — how and why I set up this blog.