First Pair Press Begins
First Pair Press is a new, and world’s first, Human+AI publishing house. Sprung whole-cloth from Dr Khrabrov’s imagination and longbeard Unix troff and scientific TeX tradition, it lets writers create books from the first principles (FP), with AI research (AIR) help: FP AIR, first pair, a pair comprised of human and AI partners.
It started from a rather poorly written biography of Garibaldi mentioning his Rio Grande exploits. I’ve never heard about that short-lived independent republic fighting its Brazilian metropole before and wanted to read more, but there aren’t many sources. And the only one available for download is in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies digital library, from the 19th century, in Portuguese.
And so I asked Codex to translate it, and it did. We iterated on the tone, style, accents, everything. The book turned out to be amazing. Here's how it starts:
Never did bravery, constancy, and civic virtues, served by men of scant education, offer of themselves a more surprising spectacle than in that struggle of nearly ten years, which calls up to the historian’s mind the traditional tenacity of the ancient peoples.
When I read it, I experience a feeling of wonder. For days I sensed being in the presence of a miracle, a voice of the past that I've summoned, that nobody else had ever heard. But the voice is authentic, telling us about the events that transpired almost 200 years ago, the events a few people remember now. I've pulled a book out of ether, out of nothing, a wholly original, vibrant, and interesting book.
Creating it was not a mere question of one or two prompts, it took days and weeks to tune what I wanted to create. There's a state of the art typography toolchain with pandoc and typst, mermaid diagrams, and both PDF and epub formats as output. I load the books on a large Kindle Scribe, on an Android tablet, and view them in the Books app on an iPhone, and in PDF on a Mac. I've even went back to the original Unix typesetting workflow from Bell Labs, for troff, reincarnated as Neatroff, for a different esthetics -- another expression of typography with different fonts, spacing, etc.
Once I've established the typesetting workflow, I've started adding AI-research books to all of my code repositories. From explaining large codebases to developinmg my own, AI-native books help me learn and teach others. And since tools like Codex and Claude Code afre capable of computer use and deep research, we can apply the same AI-first book idea to many areas of learning.
For instance, I got interested in audio recording, such as vocals and electronic music. I like the musician Kiffness who finds fun videos of cats and sings with them, mixing beats on an Akai MPK mini. He often shows the effects he adds with subtutles. I've asked Codex to write a book with me, for me, to learn the MPK and the exact setup required to reproduce some of his mixes. The book was built as a PDF and also as an interactive HTML tutorial, hosted on my github.
See the first-pair music tutorials at alexy.github.io/music.
That brought me to the point of a large project that always interested me. I love Venice, its history, culture, and art. It's been fascinating for me to observe that the young United States republic overlapped with the independent Republic of Venice for 21 years, since the inception of one to the sunset of the other. The common threads span centuries, with the idea of Venice inspiring the founders, the actual correspondence in real time, and the eternal afterlife.
So one day, after I'd regained my access to Fable 5, knowing we'll only have it in our plan u til July 7 (since extended), I asked it to write the book about the two republics overlapping, interacting, influencing each other. Over days and weeks I added plot lines, a braided structure, with a cast of characters from the US founders to humanist titans, from Cicero to Zucchero. We've added dozens of illustrations, historical maps, and our own diagrams. We collected all the sources we could download to an enormous anthology, linking others thoroughly.
And I asked Fable to write it in the voice of Assis Brasil, the author of the Rio Grande history reincarnated in English. Not only it is a bit archaic, it is unafraid of generalization and emotion, painting landscapes as defining the people inhabiting them, with sweeping judgements, and a freedom of hindsight if the 19th century man of action and history.
Once we had that amazing book, with its elaborate, rolling sentences, I thought, what if we write the same book but in the style and voice of Haruki Murakami, one of my favorite writers? With an immediacy of observation and presence like Brasil, but simpler wordsm shorter sentences, etc. And Fable had done it. So I asked it to do that again, but as a Hemingway. And it did it again.
Now that I had the three versions, I wanted to compare them thoroughly. So we worked, now with Codex, to first review them and edit each for its own stye consistency and readability, breaking long sentences in Murakami and speeding up cadence in Hemingway. Then we created a ROsetta stone -- a triptych, where each Kindle page has three parts, from one book each, aligned, scored by style, and graded by semantic features such as rare words, new content, compression or fusion.
This new mode of operation requires as much work of a writer as before -- now mostly spent in review, design, and historical research supported by deep search. I've finally become a writer of novel and deep history and biography I always dreamt of. Even though my English is not native, I'm able to style and fine tune it with my AI collaborators. And they write for me knowing exactly hwta I want to learn.
It struck me that in the middle of consolidating my typography pipeline, reviving troff, Codex suddenly told me: I know something you'd like! And it shared the Bell Labs workflow -- holding the primacy of ideas and human writing as text, adding troff, pic, tbl as a reification, that becomes exceptionally modern again with the help of agents supporting us in the background. As I was looking for a name of my new method, I've called it AI-first, AI-native, AI-aligned learning, bespoke AI-aided books, etc. Still it was a bit unwieldy and imprecise. Then it occurred to me that these books are written from First Principles (FP) with AI-aided Research -- a First Pair of human and AI coauthors building books the new way.
Thus First Pair Press is born. The workflow is on github as alexy/firstpair.
published with omnighost · SHA-256 c153817e04ad0a4863d2c50bbcbe978b69d4645b9998d06296d9f12ad059572d