Building in the open

Dev Journal

Notes from building MoVox — the choices, the engineering, and what’s next.

• September 23, 2026 A series · 4 parts

  Two months quiet

  I went dark on a build-in-public project to make a demo. Four notes on what happened instead: the pictures, the book, the voice, and a second computer.

  1. 一 I went quiet to make a demo I vanished for two months because I wanted a clip I could post. The pipeline can draw now, and chapter one plays end to end. The pictures still don't pass my review, and that's the honest status of the demo.
  2. 二 Sixteen thousand characters gone In June an audit found 15,753 characters missing from the book. I fixed it, got to 99.96%, and told you in July that the Reader works. This summer I found out 99.96% is not the book. A contract the model won't keep has to be enforced in code.
  3. 三 Six minutes is not a voice I wanted the narrator to be me. A real reference clip already sounds like me. Fine-tuning on six minutes of isolated sentences taught the model my timbre and then made me shout. I stopped tuning.
  4. 四 It's two computers now In July I said MoVox ran on one machine on my desk. Now it runs on two. The second one is a 32-gigabyte MacBook, and it didn't buy me better pictures. It bought me a second card, which is a different thing.

• July 25, 2026

  A text file goes in, a film comes out

  What MoVox actually is, end to end. Five AI agents, one human signing off at every checkpoint, all of it running on one machine on my desk — plus an honest account of which parts work today and which parts are still a gray rectangle.

• July 23, 2026

  The book was too heavy

  How my love of the Chinese classics began — a Journey to the West too heavy for a second-grader — and why, decades later, I'm teaching a computer to read those stories to my kids in my own voice.

• July 23, 2026

  AI is just the next tool

  Two halves of one stance: AI isn't coming for your job, and what it makes isn't slop. An engineer on why the next tool is just that — a tool — and how craft survives, drawn from building MoVox.