Goblin Candy
Field guides for curious humans, explained by goblins.
Each guide is built from a real project, with the wrong turns left in so you can skip them. Hello, I'm Nib. I'll be your guide.
Open now
Start with the machine behind every chatbot answer.
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Field guide
The Goblin Guide to AI Infrastructure
How a chatbot answer is made, from sand to your screen: the chips, memory, racks, power and pipes, and how each goblin along the way gets paid.
Read the guide -
Augmented reality, best on a phone
Nib's Mountain
The same journey in your room. Ask a real language model a question, watch its words travel through a life-size GPU rack, and collect all three expedition stamps.
Start the expedition
Coming soon
Nib is still digging. These are on the workbench.
- Guide and AR experience
How a Model Thinks
From chopped-up words to a whole answer: tokens, attention, why the words come back in order, and how one hidden note turns the same model into a goblin, a pirate or a caveman.
- Field guide
The Workbook Autopsy
What does that inherited spreadsheet actually do? Hidden sheets, what calls what, stale data and hard-coded surprises, found step by step.
- Maker project
Waking a 2002 Pocket Computer
A new battery, books and games on a Memory Stick, and a homebrew cat game written in C for a Palm OS handheld.
- Maker project
A Cat on Your Wrist
Building your own smartwatch face from scratch, with a cat for company.
Nib says: Shovel goblins sell you the tools once. Candle goblins sell you something every night. I just like explaining things. That's the candy.