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Thomas Wood

Phytomech Industries
Profile picture of Mr. Thomas Wood
A bit about me...
🥼 Head of AI Research and Development @ Pieces
👨‍💻 Chief Technology Officer @ Phytomech
📈 MS graduate in Applied Mathematics @ University of Washington

I’m super cool. You should follow me on at-proto.

What I’m Working On

🤖 Robotics & AI

Currently knee-deep in robotics, working on connecting maniskill with lerobot. Building systems that help people explore and share their ideas, whether that’s robotics, math, or anything else.

🌱 Hydroponics & 3D Printing

Designing and printing vertical grow towers using FreeCAD and Python. Working on modular, stackable systems with precise water flow control and optimal plant spacing. The goal is to make high-efficiency growing systems that are both beautiful and functional.

🖥️ High-Performance Computing

Working with Slurm to manage computational resources for everything from robotics simulations to hydroponic system design. Building tools that make it easier to run complex simulations and process large datasets.

✍️ Technical Writing

Building a better system for technical content – not just another AI writing tool, but a system that helps organize scattered knowledge into coherent structures. Whether it’s a tweet, a blog post, or a book, the goal is to help people maintain consistency and build on their ideas without losing the human element.

🖧 Infrastructure

Working on a hybrid setup that combines local development with executable books, cloud runners, and bare-metal hardware so experiments can scale from a laptop to the cluster with minimal friction.

Recent journal entries

Search as Grounding

A friend of mine on bluesky asked me to write up my notes on how to add web_search tools to their copilot through an MCP server and searxng running locally, which I've got set up and use as my local search engine by default in the browser. But yeah anyway here's

Date: October 13, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
Crystals

So that's kind of what I'm thinking about right now. If I start to develop a new agent in copilotkit or if I should try to integrate with the IDE I actually use for work. Saying "I'm going to build my own IDE" sounds a lot more trivial when I'm

Date: September 27, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
Dunno

My plan of attack: 1. Replicate main functionality of tools in deepagents with equivalent MCP tool for DSPy 2. Create DSPy server with history and postgres persistence/memory 3. Endpoints for streaming and for no streaming that emit hooks for frontend 4. Discover how frontend is working, how it is showing everything in langgraph 5. There

Date: August 28, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
DS.jl when?

So I've really gotten into julia over the past few days. Friday morning I sat down with trae-agent and zed and wrote a [whole little agent][openai-tool-calling-jl]. And now I've got the bug. It started with "I'm going to sit down and create my own programming language with MLIR because I

Date: August 24, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
plan-execute

:::{tip} My version of plan-execute This comes from [plan-execute][plan-execute] tutorial on langgraph's doc site. I have put it in its [own repo][my-plan-execute] too ::: First we have a bunch of imports ```python from pydantic import BaseModel, Field import operator from typing import Annotated, List, Tuple, Union, Literal from typing_extensions import TypedDict import asyncio from langchain_community.tools.searx_search.tool import SearxSearchResults from langchain_community.utilities import

Date: August 03, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
High Frequency versus High Quality

So it feels like I can post with high frequency or with high quality but not with both. I guess that's why I haven't done much with my book(s) I want to write. I'm content to just vomit status updates into the void. I still want to revisit the idea of

Date: August 02, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
Advanced Eschatonics

date: "2025-07-28" title: "Gauss Law" [gauss-law](#gauss-law) What do you know? :::{important} Deep research article inbound ::: Great. I’ll gather detailed, connected insights from the past three months on recent academic advances in: * Single-cell omics (especially spatial omics), * Computational systems biology, * Synthetic developmental biology, …with a focus on work from HHMI labs and other leading groups (like the Whale

Date: July 28, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
Digital Lazarus

Here are the steps I finally figured out for getting my account's service endpoint changed from advanced-eschatonics.com to pds.advanced-eschatonics.com. I was inspired by whtwnd and how they use my pds to log me in. I also am the head of AI Rearch and Development at a startup and a lot

Date: July 27, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
Gear

I guess I absolutely need to get the mystmd system set up because I have been microblogging all week. I even used freaking whtwnd and it's plain jane vanilla markdown smdh. Yeah that's it. The fork of whtwnd must continue. Let's revisit this real quick and take stock of what we've already

Date: July 19, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood
URDF and trae-agent

I don't know. What did I do this week? Feels strange like the sixth was more than five days ago. The Sim2Real failed because the Real2Sim step wasn't accurate enough. I started putting the meshes that make up the robot base and camera mounts together with the mesh for the base of

Date: July 13, 2025 | Author: Thomas Wood