The Workbench collects an academic’s workshop notes on two intertwined lines of work: building small, transparent tools for teaching finance, and running hands-on experiments to understand how AI language models behave.
The writing comes in two registers. Long essays work an idea through carefully — the kind of piece meant to be read once, slowly, and returned to. Field notes are shorter and rougher: a result, a dead end, a tool that just started working.
The aim throughout is the same: to make the machinery legible. Whether the subject is a spreadsheet model or the inner workings of a Transformer, the bet is that you understand a tool best when you can see — and ideally perturb — every moving part.
I am Luca Erzegovesi, and I write these notes from my own teaching and research.
How this is made
The work here is mine, but not made alone. I draft and edit the essays — and build and debug the small tools and models I demonstrate — in close collaboration with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, often in extended working sessions. Claude helps with drafting, sharpening explanations, writing and debugging code, and stress-testing arguments; I set the direction, make the judgement calls, verify the results, and take full responsibility for what is published. Where a piece leans especially heavily on that collaboration, I say so in the post. AI is a named tool in this workshop — not an uncredited ghostwriter, and not a co-author.