Share Your Prompt, Bro!

There is a reply that trails every software release in 2026 the way gulls trail a trawler: share your prompt, bro. Underneath it sits an assumption — that somewhere on my disk is one glorious paragraph that, pasted into the right chat window, produces a synthesizer. I like the question, honestly. It deserves a real answer, and the real answer is more interesting than yes or no.

Counting from 1989

I wrote my first code around 1989, maybe 1990 — the tools were whatever the machine offered, which meant BASIC, assembler, and Fortran. In 1990 my friends and I started building a game, with visuals and sound, and it taught me the lesson I have been re-learning ever since: the interesting code is the code that touches the senses. By 1996 I had a pile of electronic music tracks ready. The first album came out in 2001.

So when someone asks how long Phaseburn One took, the honest answer depends on where you start the clock.

The part with no prompt in it

I spent years in DSP the usual way: Teensy boards, Raspberry Pis, C++, and other people’s frameworks. The frameworks were the ceiling. For the attacks and releases I wanted, I needed 64-bit precision through the whole path. I needed proper oversampling and honest alias suppression, not a checkbox labeled HQ. So I started writing my own DSP. C++ first. But by then I was already in love with Rust — there are ten Rust books in my home right now, which is either devotion or a diagnosis — so I began the rewrite in Rust. Libraries at first; then, when I understood their limits, all the way down to a pure native implementation.

That was a no-AI project, by choice. I wrote every oscillator, every filter, every carefully de-clicked gate myself. I did talk to AI about algorithms — the way you argue with a well-read friend at two in the morning — but it wrote none of the DSP.

The interface that almost ate the instrument

My first UI was egui, and egui was a mistake, for this project at least. You recompile the entire application to find out whether moving a knob ten pixels was a good idea. It usually wasn’t, and now you are compiling again. I moved the interface into a webview, and the ten-pixel question became a ten-second question.

Here is the uncomfortable part: the DSP was finished about half a year ago, and I liked it. And I still couldn’t share it with anyone, because an instrument you cannot navigate is not an instrument — it is a folder full of code.

And Phaseburn One needs navigating. Finding the sweet spot of a phase-locked loop is genuinely hard — hard enough that the next thing on my bench is visual phase controls: a way to see what the loop is doing instead of guessing at it. But first I had to make sense of all the knobs, and I wanted the help built into the instrument itself. This is where AI finally earned its seat: it helped me map six-hundred-odd parameters into the built-in manual, keep the documentation from rotting, and put the website together. Housekeeping — but the kind I would still be doing by hand next spring.

The experiment I killed

Since we are being honest about AI, one more story. For a few months I trained a model on nearly every piece of music I could feed it, teaching it to generate sequencer patterns. It worked well. Then I A/B’d it against the algorithmic GENERATE engine already in the synth — no training data, just probability and rules — and the algorithm won. I ditched the model entirely.

I keep thinking about that result. The model had heard almost everything and produced patterns that sounded like almost everything. The algorithm knew nothing and produced patterns that sounded like a decision.

What I like, and what I owe you

What do I actually like about my own instrument? I like the PLL sound. I still enjoy it — which, for your own work, is the hardest review there is — and I hope you will too. I like that the probability sequencer can play for hours and stay interesting, neither repeating itself nor wandering off.

Smaller things, but important: Audio Unit support is in the works, and on some versions of Windows the app can still crash. Getting those right is my entire focus — you should get a fully polished thing that works on your machine. That is the whole promise.

So — share your prompt

I could sit here making presets forever. But what I actually want runs the other direction: show me what this thing can do. Your patches, your tracks, your complaints — especially the complaints.

So yes, fine: share your prompt, bro. There was never a prompt for the DSP. But there is a prompt for what happens next, and you are holding it. It is a patch. It is a track. It is an email that says this knob makes no sense. Send it. Let’s make it together.

The prompt window is open. Get Phaseburn One — free through the beta, a demo after October 15, 2026 until you register — and send me what you make.