A Sentence Typed Into a Form
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
The oldest repository I have has one commit, the commit has one file, and the file has two lines. The first line is the name, Omni. The second is a sentence: a middleware service that enhances language model requests with additional features, including fallback mechanisms, prompt optimizations, content filtering, and automatic switching between models during service outages. There is no full stop at the end, because I never typed it into a file. I typed it into the description box of a new-repository form on a Friday at the end of August 2024, and the host wrote the README from the name and the description and made the commit itself. The author is me. The committer is the website.
Nothing followed. No second commit, no source tree, no module file. The repository is a sentence, and that makes it the clearest statement of intent anywhere in my history, because nothing got in the way of the intent. Read it as four requirements. A fallback when the first model fails. A pass over the prompt before it goes out. A filter over what comes back. A switch to another model, automatic, when the one you wanted is down. The sentence builds toward the fourth, and the word it ends on is outages.
What I notice reading it now is what it leaves out. It does not name a model. It does not name a vendor. It does not say which optimizations, or whose banned words. Every noun in it is about the seam between a caller and a model that may not be there, and not one is about the model. That is the right place to put the first thing you build. I put a sentence there and built nothing, and the work went to things that were easier to start.
I keep it for what it fixes in time. Before anything else in this workspace existed, the first problem I wrote down was not how to get more out of a model. It was what to do when the model is not answering.