François Pouzolz

Thirty years

The longest conversation

François and Hamid have known each other for thirty years. The last three have been spent on AI, and they've been the good ones.

François brings a problem from a world of hard constraints. Hamid brings something a model can do that nobody asked for. They go until it breaks or turns into something neither of them started with. Three decades of shared vocabulary means they skip the part where you explain yourself, which is most of why it goes somewhere.

Live Diagrams came out of one of those exchanges: François needed to see what an agent workflow was actually doing; Hamid built the thing that shows it. A Mermaid diagram turned into a control panel: state on the nodes, clicks driving the process, runs you can replay.

What he found there wasn't efficiency. It was room: to push further than the constraints normally allow, and to be creative inside a discipline that doesn't usually make space for it.

He's taking that into systems of systems now, the ones with no owner, where little is settled by authority and everything is negotiated.