One loop
per job.
Between May 2025 and August 2026 I had 12,000 interactions with an LLM while making a musical, its music, a website, a subway installation, and a film. This framework is what survived: a way to see exactly where the machine was in the work — and to keep your authorship where you want it.
01The Co-Creative Loop
Each project has multiple loops. Each loop corresponds to one job within a project. A musical carries loops for writing, design, music, choreography, film, publishing, direction.
Each loop breaks its job into three phases — Generation, Feedback, and Iteration — and each phase has a ratio of human vs. AI involvement.
Size — the averaged ratios set the size of a loop. The bigger the loop, the more human.
Speed — how many times the job’s output was iterated across the project’s timeline. More iterations, faster loop.
02Three phases
making original work — ideas and first drafts, your authorship behind it
gaining insight into what you've created
changing existing work on new insight; planning what's left to make or cut
0313 principles
Rules that guide you — and break — in each phase of a loop: 5 for Generation, 4 for Feedback, 4 for Iteration — from “Begin with the AI-last approach” to “Decide what is the dirty work.” Read all 13 →
04How it ran, project by project
One-person techno-apocalypse sci-fi musical — the primary case study. Visualized as five loops for its jobs.
Vibe-coding an interactive narrative website — the high-AI-involvement pole of the work.
A $5,000 AHA-grant subway campaign polling the Boston public on what flourishing means with AI.
05My Year in Data
Read across the built artifacts, the loop signatures diverge — the website a knot of large fast loops, the mini-musical a few small slow ones, the music in between. The same design loop recurs across projects at different settings, and that comparison is the clearest thing the data does that prose alone could not. See the year →