Hi, I'm Morten.

The cookbook

There is something special about a recipe you got from someone. You think of the person it came from while you cook. And even when you follow the recipe, it may not taste quite the way it did when they made it.

Many of those recipes live on handwritten notes, in messages, or in the head of whoever usually does the cooking. I wanted to gather them in a personal cookbook, so they would be easy to find, use and pass on in the family.

That became cookMOS.

With AI I could describe what I wanted to make and get help building it. I tried things out, got new ideas and adjusted along the way. That was my way into vibe coding, and it got hold of me. Something I had only had in my head until then, I could now open and use.

But I couldn't read the code myself.

Understanding what I built

The AI said it all worked. I wanted to be sure.

I could press a button myself and see whether it did what it should. But I couldn't see through the code behind it. And when I asked the AI that had written it to check the work, I was still left with an answer I couldn't judge myself.

I had been given the chance to build my idea. Now I needed to understand what I had actually had built.

That was the beginning of prismMOS. If I couldn't read the code myself, I had to try to build something that could go through it for me and explain what I needed to decide.

I had Ciel and Jarvis in the back of my mind. Imagine having an assistant that knew the project, could help with the technical side and give me an explanation I actually understood. One I could talk my ideas through with, and that would also speak up when I had missed something.

I'm still working on that ambition.

When the conversation loses the thread

The more I built, the more the collaboration with AI itself came to matter.

We could spend a long time finding a good solution, and in the next conversation I had to explain it all again. Or I asked for a small fix and got something back that changed far more than we had agreed.

Then there I was, trying to find my way back to what actually worked.

So I started developing methods to hold on to our decisions and examine the work before we built further. They were also meant to help challenge my ideas. I needed to spot the problems while we could still do something about them.

What helped in one project I took with me into the next. Over time I spent as much time making the collaboration with AI work as on what we built together.

What I want to pass on

Today both are gathered under episMOS: the products, and the ways of working that grew up along the way.

I want to make it easier for others to get more out of the AI tools they already use. You should be able to get started even if you can't code or don't know how all the technical parts fit together. That is also why I work on solutions that can be used without setting up a separate API and paying for tokens on the side.

I often think about how much cookMOS set in motion for me. I wanted to make a cookbook, and suddenly I could start building things I would once have had to ask others to make.

That chance is what I want to pass on. That more people can take hold of an idea they would otherwise have put down, and get help along the way. Including help to understand the work well enough to decide for themselves where it should go.

A little about my background

My full name is Morten Oxholm Skjærbæk, and I live in Struer, Denmark. I trained as a social worker and have worked in social work and municipal administration.

Before my degree I lived in Ireland for almost five years. At EA Games I worked in technical support. At Apple I worked on complex customer cases, de-escalation and negotiation. I have also taken an AI course at Itucation, and I'm actually a qualified personal trainer too, but that's another story.

Why episMOS?

The question from my work with vibe coding has stayed with me: how do I actually know whether what I'm told is right?

“epis” comes from epistemology, the study of knowledge. I use that approach when I build my systems. I want to understand what an answer rests on, what has been checked, and what we are still unsure about. That of course applies to my own solutions too.

MOS is my initials, Morten Oxholm Skjærbæk. It also plays on cosmos and on the moss (mos in Danish) on the forest floor. The projects connect and are gradually growing into their own little universe. And I like that the name also holds something as down-to-earth as moss.

AI makes more possible. Understanding makes it useful.

What are you working on?

Do you have an idea you'd like to get started on, or are you already building something?

I'd like to hear about it. And you're welcome too if you have questions, or think some of this could be approached differently.