Thinking about
what we build
On AI engineering, physics simulation, and building software at scale.
Recent posts
Browse the archiveLearning Auto-Routing by Building: From Brute Force to an Auto-Design Agent
How I learned auto-routing for photonic chips — a failed brute-force attempt, AI as a learning partner, interactive HTML arenas, a PhotonForge router, and an agent that iterates 27 designs in under three minutes.
Predicting Peak Memory for an Electromagnetic Mode Solver
How we replaced a heuristic memory estimate with a calibrated model for Tidy3D mode solver workloads, eliminating under-predictions across the calibration set.
Can AI Agents Autonomously Design Components on Photonic Chips?
We gave AI agents a photonic simulator, a DRC engine, and four design challenges. They autonomously designed waveguide bends, crossings, splitters, and demultiplexers — some reaching near-perfect performance.
Designing a Photonic Chip Component with ~45 Lines of Python
A compact introduction to photonic inverse design with Tidy3D, using a pre-built simulation and a ~45-line optimization loop.
"What Should We Work On Next?"
The story of building an 80,000-line autodiff library almost entirely through AI agents — and the verification infrastructure that made it possible.
The Agent Control Loop — Engineering for Tolerance
Why agent reliability isn't magic model behavior — it's an environment where correctness is continuously verified. A framework for deciding when and how to delegate to AI agents.