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The Zen of
AI Composition

Building Intelligent Systems from First Principles

by Kacper Wikiel

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What's inside

I

The Nature of Composition

The history and philosophy of AI transformations. Why modularity wins. The bitter lesson and economics of scale.

II

The Transformations

From sound, documents, images, text, and video. Understanding each modality and how they connect.

III

The Practice

Patterns of assembly. Evidence-based prompting. The craft of building systems that actually work.

"The goal is not to create intelligent machines, but to compose intelligence from simple transformations."

This is not another AI tutorial with code snippets that will be outdated next month. It's a way of thinking about intelligent systems that will remain useful regardless of which models dominate tomorrow.

No hype. Just principles that work, grounded in evidence and experience.

No specific model worship. Capabilities change; patterns of composition endure.

No LinkedIn frameworks. Research-backed techniques that actually improve results.

Table of Contents

Part I: The Nature of Composition

  • Prologue: A Brief History of Transformations
  • On the Art of Assembly
  • Principles of Composition
  • The Bitter Lesson
  • The Economics of Scale

Part II: The Transformations

  • From Sound
  • From Documents
  • From Images
  • From Text
  • From Video

Part III: The Practice

  • Patterns of Assembly
  • On Prompting
  • The Craft of Composition

Appendices

  • Transformation Taxonomy
  • Implementation Notes

About the Author

Kacper Wikiel builds AI systems at the intersection of research and production. He runs CodeSOTA, documenting what actually works in applied machine learning.

This book distills years of building, breaking, and rebuilding AI systems into principles that transfer across domains and survive model generations.

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