About Cog & Code

Cog & Code is a place for exploring an old human fascination: building machines that can do things we once thought only we could do.

That story didn't begin with computers, and it certainly didn't begin with artificial intelligence.

For thousands of years, people have tried to reproduce aspects of the world — and eventually aspects of ourselves — through machinery. Ancient mechanisms modelled the movement of the heavens. Automata moved, played music, wrote and drew. Mechanical calculators performed arithmetic. Punched cards gave machines instructions. Computers turned those instructions into software, and today artificial intelligence can generate, reason, converse and increasingly act.

Cog & Code follows that journey.

The cog represents the mechanical past: gears, clockwork, ingenious mechanisms and the extraordinary automata created long before electronic computers existed.

The code represents what followed: computation, software, artificial intelligence, agents and increasingly autonomous systems.

But the most interesting part is the space between them.

Those are the questions Cog & Code explores through stories from the history of machines, articles about the technology emerging today, and practical projects where we build things and see what actually happens.

It isn't intended to predict some distant technological future. Nor is it an attempt to argue that every new development in artificial intelligence will change the world.

It's a workshop.

A place to look backwards, experiment with what's happening now, and occasionally wonder what might come next.

Welcome to Cog & Code.