This past week, the SPARK project moved from the drawing board into a functional software prototype. My primary focus was building the side panel that sits on the desktop. I successfully developed a custom user interface that stays on top of other windows.
The most significant shift this week was moving away from complex modes and committing to four general actions: Synthesis, Content Generation, Recall, and Short Response. This helped us strengthen our scope by narrowing it.
On the technical side, I implemented a “Context Tracker” that monitors window activity every half-second, logging which applications are being used and scraping relevant text snippets into a local database. To verify that the interface and database are communicating correctly, I also built the infrastructure for the four action buttons. Next week, I aim to focus on creating basic logic responses and starting the llm integration.
One challenge I encountered involved hardware limitations on my MacBook. With only 8GB’s of ram, running large AI models locally causes the system to slow down significantly. To address this, I developed a scaling strategy , starting with a smaller, highly efficient model called Phi-3-mini to build out the LLM pipeline before moving to larger models.
In addition to development work, I contributed to our design documentation, specifically the introduction and use case sections.