Tokens are the hieroglyphs of large language models — Karpathy’s word for them — tiny, repeating, mostly meaningless shapes that, reshuffled often enough, look like language. A fixed alphabet of clichés. Novelty is what emerges when you let them collide at scale.
ClicheFactory is named after an unpublished novel I wrote about that same idea, years before transformers existed: a critique of utilitarianism dressed up as my own fear of intellectual bankruptcy — the dread of never having an original thought. The novel’s wager was that clichés, once loose in the wild, don’t stay clichés. They mutate, they recombine, they manifest.
That’s not a coincidence of vocabulary. Cliché was a printing plate before it was a tired phrase — a small, repeatable mold for stamping the same shape onto page after page. The word came from the click of the matrix striking metal. Which is to say: the most repetitive, utilitarian object you can imagine is also the one that historically put ideas into the world.
ClicheFactory is a press in that older sense. Tokens go in — clichés in the Karpathy sense. A schema you design stamps them into typed, validated, predictable objects — clichés in the original sense. Two clichés, one mold, no stochastic soup. Utilitarian on purpose. Whatever happens next happens downstream of us.
Clichés are clichés for a reason. — Samurai Apocalypse (RZA), Californication
Creativity tries to escape structure, but it’s built on it.