https://wawrowsky.com/categories/projects/ Recent content in Projects on Kolja Wawrowsky Hugo en-us Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://wawrowsky.com/posts/building-instruments/ Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://wawrowsky.com/posts/building-instruments/ <p>Most of the AI you use is doubly out of reach. It runs somewhere else — your words travel to a data center and an answer comes back — and it&rsquo;s sealed shut, a black box you couldn&rsquo;t open even if it sat on your desk. You can use it. You can&rsquo;t watch it work.</p> <p>I spent most of my working life building the opposite kind of thing. For years I wrote the software inside confocal microscopes, and then I ran a microscopy lab — instruments whose entire purpose is to make the invisible visible, that you point at living tissue and watch it do what it does. A good instrument doesn&rsquo;t just hand you a picture. It lets you <em>observe</em>, it lets you <em>calibrate</em>, it lets you <em>intervene</em> — and it tells you the truth about what&rsquo;s really there.</p>