a library as a memory
Three directions my mind wants to dive into: building in public, a library as the museum of knowledge, and now, in the agentic era, what it feels like to be the driver of an agentic codebase. These are the early stages of síntesis, a design system of my own, my take on it, that has lived in my mind for quite some time. Let’s say that AI helped me take the leap.
who is síntesis
Short for fotosíntesis — the process by which plants turn sunlight into energy. The process that fuels them, that creates the vibrant colours of flowers, fields of green in the countryside, the bloom of spring. It felt fitting, natural, close, to name a design system of my own after the process that makes my favourite season feel whimsical and romantic. A way to add colour in the corners of the internet.
That’s síntesis, at least the idea of it. And as a design system codebase, there’s still the not-so-glamorous work that needs doing first, and I think that’s exactly where AI entered the room.
an agentic-built system
I still love code. The monospace, the simplicity of just font and a blank editor, the same joy I get when typing poems on my phone, or letters on a typewriter, or right now, writing this directly in my notes app. I’ll also admit that some of the repetitive work in engineering becomes tedious. If you look closely at anything you really love doing, there are always parts that are not as exciting or glamorous. Maybe those parts had been holding me back from starting síntesis after a whole day of working in code.
Then agentic CLI came into the picture, and it opened a door. It made the thought of working on some ideas exciting again. Starting síntesis let me feel, for the first time, that maybe AI is here to make room, to create space to really play again. So I took an approach: no line of code in síntesis will be written by me. I’m building a team, a set of agents that will help with the foundations, clearing a path for innovation after the 9-to-5. But they need to be trained. They need somewhere to go when they need to confirm something. My agents needed a library.
the library; the librarian
Okay so… tokens are not cheap. Maybe this resonates with the idea of why engineer salaries are what they are. Agentic CLI is expensive, possibly the most expensive usage of AI I’ve encountered so far. My agents needed a place to learn what they needed, and teaching them manually required a lot of back and forth and repeated misunderstandings. Sending them back to research something again felt costly.
Maybe we’re too conditioned to having the internet available at all times, but searching for something again is still expensive even for us. We burn time, our most limited resource, and energy to relearn it, and memory to hold it. The truth is, even when I read something multiple times, I will not always remember it. It was silly of me to get frustrated that an agent could not remember it perfectly either.
So I built them my favourite place as a child. A library.
It became the concept of memory in an agentic world, a place to return to knowledge and guidance. And a library needs someone to keep things tidy, searchable, and discoverable. So my first agent ever was a librarian, the only one with permission to add, change, or remove documents. Trained to understand how documentation in the library is organised, filed, created, archived, outdated, or updated. The library is open to everyone to read and search through. But never to change. Only the librarian can.
So maybe there is a fourth direction here: learning to create (sub)agents.
I promised myself a while ago to always find a way to add some whimsy and magic into the things I do. The whole agentic thing took me a while. But now I have a library, cared for by a librarian, the first thing I wanted to be as a child, in a system whose own fotosíntesis is helping me build a colourful corner of the internet, in the open, for the world to see, hoping it inspires you to follow that little hint of excitement and discover where it takes you. —
see how the seasons change — github.com/jesspagan/sintesis
written by Jessica Pagán Sánchez. co-edited with Claude.