Compound vision tiles reality into a mosaic — not sharp, but wide enough to catch what a single lens misses. Lévy flights alternate deep local searches with long lateral jumps — fractal, not random. Predictive processing fills sensory gaps before data arrives. mosca starts from these three patterns — a fly's brain as operating system.
This post isn't about the name. It's about why any of this exists.
The process
Building anything serious means making thousands of small decisions. Which model to use. When to build and when to buy. When to trust data and when to trust your gut.
Those decisions live in Slack threads, sprint retros, and the heads of a few people. They don't compound. They don't connect. They disappear.
This blog is the fix. The actual process — trade-offs, dead ends, architecture decisions, the gap between a demo and production. But also the lateral stuff — how fly neuroscience shaped a writing system, why foraging patterns changed how I think about strategy. The connections that only become visible when you write them down.
Writing is thinking. You force half-formed ideas through a bottleneck narrow enough to reveal what you actually believe. But it's also anticipation — you write to predict where the confusion will be. Documentation as prediction of confusion. A decision I can't articulate in writing is a decision I don't understand yet.
One post is noise. A hundred posts is a system. The value isn't in any single entry — it's in the trail.
Exploration
The startup default is heads-down execution. Ship, measure, iterate. That works until it doesn't — until you're optimizing a local maximum because you never look up.
I explore the way flies forage. Mostly local — close reads, tight iterations, deep in one problem. Then a long jump. A paper about insect cognition. A conversation about typography. The long jump finds what the local searches never would have.
Exploration also means stopping. Reassessing whether this is still the right problem. The willingness to turn around is as important as the willingness to jump.
Compound vision. Each ommatidium is low-resolution on its own. The mosaic catches what a single sharp lens would miss. Exploration is how you build that mosaic.
Writing with AI
This post was written with AI. Not generated by AI — written with it.
Mosca is a soul document — a system prompt that encodes how I think and how I want to write. It's a drafting partner. It does not replace my judgment. Every sentence here passed through my head before it stayed on the page.
Future posts will include the prompts and iterations. If writing is thinking, the revision history is the thinking made visible. The entire blog — code, content, soul documents, prompts — lives in a public repo. Not because I have to. Because the process is the product.