Behind the sign
Say it:
/ˌbriː.kə.lɔɹˈeɪ/
The final beat matters. The AI is not merely a domain ending; it is the material on the workbench.
Why “bricoleur”?
A bricoleur makes with the materials at hand. The word shares its roots with bricolage: building by adapting, combining, repairing, and finding possibilities in things that were not designed to fit neatly together.
That feels like the honest way to work with AI right now. There is no single perfect stack. There are capable models, specialized agents, awkward interfaces, useful protocols, local services, bits of code, and physical machines. The interesting work is learning the grain of each piece and arranging them with judgment.
bricoleur + AI: make the available parts cooperate, then build something none of them could make alone.
The AI is the building material
This is not a general craft journal with AI sprinkled on top. It is about constructing new AI tools and systems: connecting a terminal agent to desktop software, turning speech into safe input, giving a fleet of agents a shared console, or bridging a browser and a tiny microcontroller.
Sometimes the AI part is a model. Sometimes it is an agent loop, a context layer, a safety policy, or the interface that lets a person work alongside the system. Often the useful result comes from combining all of those with ordinary software and hardware.
What belongs here
Working projects first. Then clear lessons from building them, guides that survive contact with a blank terminal, code small enough to understand, and field notes honest enough to say “this is early” when it is early.