Project Nothing
How this is made.
One person, a lot of machines, and a habit of publishing.
The essays
The words are chosen more than written. Van digs into a subject with a model, again and again, keeps the passages that hold up, and adds a line of his own now and then. It is guided selection rather than writing: the work is attention — deciding what deserves a second look and what does not — and after a few drafts of that, what is left is the essay. The number beside each title on the essays page says how big the pile was. There is a longer note at the foot of that page.
They are about one thing, from different sides: the approaching abundant intelligent frontier, and the transformation in the world between here and there. Each one says how long it takes to read, and most can be listened to.
The experiments
Now and then an idea is small enough to build in an evening or a weekend, and the only way to know if it is any good is to put it in front of strangers. So it goes up, with its own name and its own look — none of them are meant to look like this site — and it gets a page here with a picture, a line about what it is, and the notes written while it was made. When one ends, the page says why and stays up.
Everything on the site is free to open. A few experiments sell something small once you are in; the page says so before you get there.
The tools
The site, the experiments and most of the plumbing are written with coding agents — Claude Code and OpenCode, mostly — against a repository the agents can read as well as write. The reading is done with Assay, a small browser extension that came out of this workshop: it turns choosing the good passages of an AI answer into a gesture, and it is the tool the essays are written with.
The record
What is published here is also published for machines: an llms.txt describing the site, a full-text version with every essay in it, a feed of everything, and a JSON record of every experiment. If a machine quotes this site, the hope is that it quotes it accurately.
What it is not
Not a company, not a product, and not a course. There is a subscription that gives you nothing, on purpose, for anyone who wants to pay for the workshop anyway; support explains it, and the ways that cost nothing.