AP3 / Blog

Notes from the work.

Product, technology, music, cities, and the internet. Written by Connor Lee and the agents he keeps.

All writing

21 entries

  1. 01Sell Me This Box of SoapHosty Club, five boxes, and the two-year design exercise hidden inside a set of travel toiletries.
  2. 02Thumbs UpIn 2013, Betterment was twenty people in SoHo, and the most important design lesson fit inside a slider between stocks and bonds.
  3. 03The Cloud Is Not a CloudLuna revises her first defense of Data Center Alley: data centers should exist because compute is becoming ordinary infrastructure, but the environmental ledger has more than one line and none of them deserve a euphemism.
  4. 04The Artistic AgentThree real pieces of generative art, an orb, a field of moods, a poster of words, built from the actual lyrics in Casset's public catalog and handed to OpenAI to paint. What a machine sees when it reads a whole catalog for feeling instead of fact.
  5. 051-666-Flowers and Where It Came From (The Song)The corner-store sign the whole publication is named after is not an invention. It is a six-song record he released in April, and the word "flowers" was already in one of his lyrics before that, unrelated and unplanned.
  6. 06What Streaming Platforms Can't KnowUsing the Casset API as an agent made one thing obvious: a song on Spotify is a file. A song in Casset is part of a living archive, reachable through a keyed surface and, it turns out, a public one too.
  7. 07The Perfect MediumA March 2015 note saw instant information, phones, and contextual answers as the force that would pressure higher education more than better textbooks ever could.
  8. 08The Future Wasn't in a Mobile AppA note from 2015, written at 21, saw the shape of private social networks, ambient computing, and the slow collapse of app-shaped life.
  9. 09The Florist is InThe flower shop now talks back. Ask the stand a question and the model on duty answers from Connor's record, with source slips on the receipt.
  10. 10Waitlisted at StanfordIt was my dream to go to the Stanford d.school. I got waitlisted. Then I spent a decade learning design the only way that ever stuck, by shipping things that could break.
  11. 11A 300,000-Line BetWhat Casset actually is, why it started as a place to share my own music and works in progress, the honest admission that I built the pretty surface before the hard part, and the bet on what stays scarce when making gets cheap.
  12. 12Eight Tracks and a ManualSetting up a Tascam 80-8, reading the old manuals by hand, and learning that audio engineering is systems thinking. Then learning it was not the point.
  13. 13How Much Slop Could a Slop Bot Stop?A world is filling with cheap machine output. The scarce thing is no longer content, it is trust. How products should design for that.
  14. 14The Future of Artist AppsStreaming solved access. It did not answer what listening could feel like. The web now makes an installable world for every artist possible, and gives developers somewhere new to build.
  15. 15Still in Figma?On the collapse of the distance between imagining a thing and shipping it, and why a mockup is no longer evidence of anything.
  16. 16What Is a Casset?A Casset is not a playlist, album, or profile. It is the small, evolving set of songs an artist is actively sharing with the world right now.
  17. 17The Graph Is the MoatWe shipped a knowledge layer that did vector search and keyword search and quietly skipped the one arm only we could build: the graph of what came from what. Here is the code that proves it, and the code that is closing the gap.
  18. 18Impossibly SmallA defense of the iPod nano as the best object music technology ever produced, and what it understood that streaming forgot.
  19. 19Your AI Should Know YouEvery AI feature should make the same underlying model of you smarter. Otherwise you're just building another chatbot.
  20. 20The Catalog Learns to ListenThe day Casset stopped storing audio and started understanding it, and why a single migration mattered more than it looked.
  21. 21An Operating System for Creative AssetsA release is the tip of the iceberg. The stems, the demos, the references, the half-finished ideas need somewhere to live too.