Why a bottega

Why this site exists

I’ve been told, more than once, that I should pick a lane.

Choose the AI research, drop the novels. Choose the novels, drop the framework. Choose the theoretical framework, drop the chip work. The advice is well-meant. It comes from a model where focus is the only path to depth.

This site is the case for a different model.

Bottega vs lab

A lab is a team optimizing within a discipline. A bottega — Leonardo’s word for his Florence workshop — is one master holding several disciplines at once. Painters, anatomists, hydraulic engineers, composers all worked in his rooms. Not as a portfolio, but because the underlying movement was the same.

He wasn’t doing many jobs. He was doing one job — investigating what attention does — through whichever material the day required.

What the materials share

I work on transformer interpretability. I write novels. I have a theoretical framework for cognitive energy that connects them.

These are not separate. The narrative dynamics framework is the spine. Every other work is one projection of it onto a particular material:

• A transformer is a routing problem. So is a novel chapter.
• A paragraph manages tension and release. So does an explanation.
• The eye in a Baroque cathedral follows leading lines. So does a reader through a sentence.

When you see them as one operation in different materials, working across disciplines stops being scattered. It becomes the only honest way to investigate the operation itself.

Why this is a moat, not a bug

Solo founders in deep tech are often advised to appear focused. The advice misses what’s actually scarce.

What’s scarce is people who can hold a foundational framework and ship implementations across multiple domains without dilution. That combination is structurally rare. Trying to manufacture it after the fact — by hiring across disciplines — usually fails because the disciplines stop talking to each other.

When the same head holds the framework and writes the implementations, the connections survive.

What lives here

• Research papers — the AI work, with public artifacts on HuggingFace.
• Novels — Flow, Promise, Korean originals, English translations in progress.
• Notes — short essays that cross the disciplines, like this one.

It’s a small site. It will grow slowly. That’s the point.