About
I write about my experience using plain text as the source of truth, at work and in life: diagrams, ledgers, specs and project plans. Text can be read, diffed, versioned and generated into multiple outputs, and now an LLM can work with it too. I’m the Capability Lead for Core Engineering at Electric Mind, and these posts draw on that work and on personal projects.
I’m Ben Hall. I’m the Capability Lead for Core Engineering at Electric Mind (formerly Intelliware).
This site is about one idea for now: plain text is a serious engineering material. When the source of truth is plain text, people can read it directly, and tools can interpret it. History, versioning, collaboration and diffing come free with git. Several outputs can be generated from one source. And with LLMs, text has become more useful again, because a model can read and write the same files we do.
The material comes from my day-to-day work: modelling systems, recovering structure from data, and increasingly running AI-assisted projects out of markdown in git.
What you won’t find here
Client work. Every example is rebuilt against an invented domain, and nothing client-identifiable appears.