Welcome to The Workbench — notes from a workshop where the tools of financial modeling, and the AI now sitting at the bench beside them, are taken apart to see how they actually work.
On the bench is Impromptu: a modeling engine I built from scratch, in which a formula says Revenue × Margin rather than =B7*C7, and into which an AI assistant is wired directly — able to open a model, write its formulas and check its results while you watch every step. The manifesto says why a professor of corporate finance would build such a thing; Impromptu under the hood opens it up and names the parts.
Around it: real financial work done with an AI at the bench, language models small enough to inspect completely, the corporate-finance classics built from a blank model — and, now and then, a note on what any of this does to the way one works. Some entries are long essays; others are short notes from work in progress. Everything permanent lives here.