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LLM

My Notes Became a Standard

For many years my "personal knowledge base" was a folder full of .txt files. Then it became a folder full of .md files. Then those files grew a little YAML hat on top. And a few months ago Google published a spec for AI agents that looks... a lot like that little YAML hat.

This post is about that journey, about what Google's Open Knowledge Format (OKF) actually is, and about md-pdf 0.2.0, which now speaks OKF natively. It takes files that were written for machines and turns them back into something a human wants to read: a nicely typeset PDF, thanks to Typst.

Software as a Story of Rising Abstraction

The history of software engineering can be understood as a sequence of abstraction shifts. Each time complexity overwhelms existing techniques, the field does not simply push harder at the same level. Instead, it raises the level of abstraction, reducing the cognitive distance between human intention and executable systems. The so-called golden ages of software engineering are the periods when such abstraction shifts fundamentally reshape what engineers can build and how they think.

This topic was discussed in the Podcast Software Engineering Past, Present, and Future with Grady Booch .