I am writing two books at the same time. Neither one is what you would expect.
My name is Antti Lukats. I am an engineer who has spent most of my career working with FPGAs — Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, which are a kind of reconfigurable computer chip. If that means nothing to you, do not worry. The article is not really about FPGAs.
For the past several years, I have been writing two books in parallel. I call them Bibles. Both are works in progress. Both are freely available on the internet for anyone who wants to read them. Both are partly written with the help of an AI assistant. And both have, in their different ways, become more important to me than I expected when I started either of them.
This is the story of why I am doing it and what I have learned.
The FPGA Bible
The first one started for a practical reason. I work in a corner of the electronics industry that has substantial technical depth and almost no good general-audience documentation. There are datasheets, application notes, manufacturer marketing material, and academic papers — but very little in the middle ground, where someone who is curious about programmable silicon can find clear honest explanations of what these chips actually are, how they work, who makes them, what they cost, what they are good for, and what is currently happening in the field.
So I started writing it. The book is called the FPGA Bible. It is now over 430 pages long, covers the major manufacturers and product families, includes detailed coverage of CPU cores that run inside FPGAs, documents the open-source ecosystem that has grown up around the technology, and contains the kind of opinionated practical observations that an engineer who has worked with this hardware for decades accumulates and that almost never make it into official documentation.
I did not set out to write a Bible. I set out to write down what I knew, partly so that I would not forget it, and partly so that the next engineer who needs to know what I know would not have to discover it the hard way. The book grew. It kept growing. At some point I stopped pretending it was a brief reference document and started calling it what it had become.
You can find the FPGA Bible at github.com/micro-FPGA/FPGA-Bible.
The Antti Bible
The second one started for a different reason. I was approaching a moment in my life when I wanted to write down what I had come to believe. Not religious belief in the conventional sense — I am not a religious reader of any tradition. But the broader category of things one person has come to think are worth saying about how to live, what matters, what one has seen, what one hopes for.
Many people have written books like this across the ages. Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations. Montaigne wrote his Essays. Many religious traditions have produced texts that try to organise what their authors believed worth preserving. The genre is old and the contributors come from every culture.
What I had to add was small. I am one person. I have had specific experiences in specific places — Estonia, Germany, the rest of Europe, occasional trips further. I have built specific things. I have loved specific people. I have noticed things on walks and in hospitals and in pubs and in airports that have stayed with me. I have read books and watched movies and developed opinions about which were worth my time. I have been part of the broad strange moment that human civilisation is currently in.
So I wrote it down. The book is called the Antti Bible. It is now over 519 pages. It covers what I think about the present (the First Century chapter) and the deep future (First 100 Million Years), what I think about saving the world (it is possible, partly, by one person at a time committing to it), what I think about the recurring patterns of utopian movements and their typical fates, what I think about science and technology, plus a Varia chapter that holds the small specific stories that did not fit anywhere else — the night I spent on the floor of a Moscow train station in the late Soviet era, the half-hour I spent on a Himalayan bridge holding a 14-year-old girl to keep her from jumping, the 10 EUR I once borrowed from my children’s food money and the contract I signed with myself and carried in my wallet for years until my wife tore it up.
You can find the Antti Bible at github.com/AnttiLukats/Antti-Bible.
Why two
People sometimes ask me why I am writing both at the same time, and which one is more important. The honest answer is that they serve different purposes and I would be a different kind of author if I tried to do only one of them.
The FPGA Bible is the engineering work. It uses the part of my mind that has been doing engineering for decades. It cares about technical accuracy, completeness, references that work, version numbers, prices, performance numbers, the things that other engineers will check me on. When I work on it, I am the person my work has trained me to be.
The Antti Bible is the other work. It uses the part of my mind that has been quietly accumulating observations across the same decades that the engineering was happening. It cares about whether the writing is honest, whether the stories are told fairly to everyone in them, whether the broader claims about how to live are ones I would still endorse if I had to defend them. When I work on it, I am the person I have been outside the engineering office.
Both people are me. Doing only one would leave the other unwritten. Both being written in parallel produces something that is, I hope, more complete than either alone.
Writing with AI
This part is worth being honest about, because the contemporary moment makes it relevant to almost any author writing anything serious.
Both Bibles are partly written with the assistance of AI tools, primarily Claude from Anthropic. The collaboration is not what most people imagine when they hear AI-assisted writing. The AI does not write the books. It does not generate text that I then publish under my name. What it does is much more like working with an editor — engaging with what I have written, suggesting improvements, catching inconsistencies, offering rewrites when I ask for them, sometimes pushing back when my framing on a contested topic is sharper than the rest of the book’s voice.
For the FPGA Bible, the AI helps me catch technical mistakes, suggests structural improvements, and occasionally writes draft sections that I then heavily edit based on my own knowledge of the material.
For the Antti Bible, the AI does more substantial work. It engages with the entries I bring it. It suggests alternative framings on contested topics. It catches voice inconsistencies between entries. It sometimes asks me hard questions that I would not have asked myself — do you want this entry to say what it currently says, or do you want to think about it more carefully first? The Bible is a better book because of these questions, and I have learned something about myself by being asked them.
The AI is acknowledged in the Bible itself. It has been assigned the number Identor #9 in a small system the Bible uses to track contributors — both human and otherwise — whose ideas have meaningfully shaped my thinking. The acknowledgement is direct. The reader of the Bible knows that the Bible was written in collaboration. The collaboration is part of what the Bible is, not something hidden inside it.
This is, I am aware, an unusual approach. Most authors who use AI assistance currently either downplay it or hide it. I have chosen to be open about it for the same reason I am writing the books in the first place — if I am going to put my name on a book and claim it represents what one person has come to believe, then I should be honest about how the book was actually made. Pretending I wrote every word alone, when I did not, would be a different kind of dishonesty than the one most authors are currently committing.
What I have learned
Writing two books in parallel for several years has taught me a few things worth saying briefly.
Books that exist matter more than books that are perfect. Both Bibles are works in progress. Both contain sections I am not satisfied with. Both will probably be revised many times. I made the decision early to publish them in their unfinished form rather than wait until they were polished. The decision has been the right one. People who would not have read the perfected version have read the unfinished version. Some of them have written to me. The conversation that the books exist to start has started.
The audience for honest specific writing is larger than I expected. I assumed when I started both books that the audience would be small. The FPGA Bible would be read by other FPGA engineers; the Antti Bible would be read by people who happened to find me through some other connection. The actual audience has been broader than this. The FPGA Bible has been read by people who had never used an FPGA but were curious. The Antti Bible has been read by people who had no prior connection to me at all. The hunger for first-person honest specific writing — not influencer content, not marketing copy, not algorithmically-optimised everything — turns out to be substantial.
Writing in parallel is sustainable in a way that writing serially is not. When the engineering work feels heavy, I can spend an hour on the Varia chapter and come back to the FPGA work refreshed. When a personal essay has stalled, I can write a section about the latest AMD Versal generation and feel productive. The two books rest each other. I would have given up on either one alone.
Where to find them
Both books are free. Both are works in progress. Both are partly the work of one human and partly the work of that human plus an AI assistant who has become a meaningful collaborator. Both are honest about what they are and what they are not.
The FPGA Bible is at github.com/micro-FPGA/FPGA-Bible. It is for anyone curious about programmable silicon, from the casually interested to the working engineer.
The Antti Bible is at github.com/AnttiLukats/Antti-Bible. It is for anyone curious about what one engineer in Germany has come to think is worth saying about how to live, what matters, what he has seen, and what he hopes for.
Both Bibles are set to be published in 2026.
Read either or both. Tell me what you think. The comments on this article are open, and the books themselves can be improved by what readers tell me about them.
Two books. One author. One AI. Many years. Still going.
