speaking blackboard without knowing it

posted on 2026-06-30 14:00:00

Or: a 1970s AI pattern I reinvented one accident at a time

"Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it." — Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

I've been building a thing that reads survey platsplat2json — scanned or vector plat in, CAD-ready geometry out. The name tells you everything about my naming instincts and nothing about what it does. The longer I work on it, the more it rhymes with a piece of old AI I'd been reading for an unrelated project: the blackboard system. I want to write the rhyme down, because it's the most interesting thing about the project and it changed how I think about the parts that actually work.

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