Writing

What Are You?What are you? This isn’t the first time in my career I’ve heard this, and I imagine it won’t be the last.
How to Build an Orchestra: A Systems Design Approach to AI WorkflowsLarge organizations have a resource-optimization problem. They have people and want fewer of them. Small organizations have a resource-existence problem.
Image Creation Agent: A faster way to get to custom editorial assetsTrust and human judgment are foundational to our business model; that isn’t corporate jargon.
We’re Not For Everyone: The story of an automated submission processThis change wasn’t so much about a technical upgrade; it was about building a system aligned with our values.
What AI Shouldn’t Touch: Designing for trust in an automated publication workflowThe central tension we face is how to publish faster without compromising our integrity as a publication.
How Do You Go From Design Vision to Shipped Product Without Dedicated Engineering Resources?I designed the Poetry Explorer; now it was time to build it. As I’ve covered before, I’m a product designer, not a developer.
Designing the Character of Poetry Explorer: Voice, Boundaries, and SafetyNow that I had the data schema designed, I started thinking about how the Poetry Explorer would interact with users. This was the most challenging part of the project. I’ve spent years creating personas, but always as representations of system users, not as representations of the system itself. And they represented people, not non-human entities...
Designing Poetry Embeddings for Semantic Search: Combining Human Judgment with LLM ClassificationMy dog died recently. It was sudden, but not unexpected. He was 15 and suffering from advanced kidney disease. When I was considering approaches to structuring and classifying data for the Poetry Explorer, I began to think about scenarios like this. I want to be able to find poetry by saying, “My best fuzzy friend...
Mood as a tool for poetry discoveryPoetry discovery is difficult for the same reasons content discovery has always been difficult: We publish a lot of poetry at San Antonio Review, enough that it gets lost in the shuffle. Readers find poems through social media, search engines, the homepage, or browsing by issue. That’s fine for new work, but poetry is evergreen...