There’s No Going Back
The LLC is filed and approved, accounts created, and months of 80+ hour weeks has finally culminated into an actual entity called Ghost Tractor. What started as a side gig is, well, actually still a side gig technically, but one that is many times the size of the one that pays the bills. Welcome to the tech grind, huh?
Argo is coming along nicely. I’d like to make some more tweaks to the interface, but I am looking forward most to the Beta review tester’s input for workflow and errata. Hopefully there won’t be much of this; Argo was developed with the most stable back-end technologies and methods we could devise. If you’re wondering, it’s a Tauri V2 Rust app underneath vanilla JS for light weight and strong multi-OS support. I’m starting off with Windows, and will be moving on to MacOS very quickly after the initial launch, which really shouldn’t take long, as it’s primarily just a case of DevOps pipelines with it’s own build steps, but the code base remains the same.
Why “Ghost Tractor”? I am bound to run into this question, so I’ll just drop it here.
I was watching a video from a very funny, if often risqué, guy who goes by the handle Rusty Eyeball. In a side comment, he stated, “I’m just a ghost, driving a meat-tractor.” Now why this non-sequitur stuck with me, I can’t say, but it did. I thought (very) briefly about “Meat Tractor,” the mental image of a logo for this, and the possible reception of the name from people without my own sense of humor could come across as alarming. “Ghost Tractor,” it is. There’s nothing else to it.
Here, heading into mid-August I am still at it every day and filing away the rough edges and improving things as I come to them. But here’s the thing: I did not design Argo Composer to be “another” editor. I didn’t even design Composer to be a competitive editor. I designed it to be best and most dominant editor, and took it far past that description to a completely Integrated Narrative Environment. I hope that when you get your hands on it, you’ll agree.
I looked at all of the competition along with concerns voiced by a growing public opinion that AI and SaaS services were growing too vast and exploitive. I am not against AI, but the very first decision I made was to make Composer the ultimate in AI organization, but at the same time, would touch none of the art the author creates in the manuscript. Use it for it’s strengths to allow you to excel in yours. AI Slop is very real and getting more pervasive every day.
Then came the SaaS service issues. You can hardly tell when any service is scraping your content and ideas anymore. So many of the popular options available (I refuse to name names) are sitting on IP ravenous beasts, and your ideas that comprise your personal value are being siphoned off in ways you are not even aware of.
I discovered my own local code editor was eating my own code and started trying to give me hints in ways that it became obvious that it was familiar with what I was building, even for sections I hadn’t even built yet. It took some rooting around in well-obscured settings and privacy policy options to finally turn this off, but it was a shock that software companies (and many others) don’t view us as customers anymore. We’re fodder. I can’t can’t control them, but I can control what I create, and I can tell you that Ghost Tractor’s offerings now and in the future is going to leave you alone to work in your art in privacy and peace.
-Bryan
