The Foil Legacy
In 2010, Patrick Hebron began work on Foil for his NYU ITP Master's thesis. Foil is a combined AI/ML Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and design tool. This architecture is driven by the core principle that since machine learning makes an application's functionality inseparable from its data, the design and development processes must operate within one continuous workspace. Foil eliminates the fragmentation caused by switching between separate creative and coding tools, keeping iterations and context intact from rough sketch to working model.
Foil integrates the entire ML project life cycle: data curation, model building/training, and interactive application design. Because Foil places media—images, audio, video, text, and sensor streams—at the center, it enables powerful simulation and control. This supports an output-as-input loop where a model can perceive the environment's visual state, query object coordinates, and issue commands to pilot entities or change the environment, closing the critical gap between authoring, training, and deployment.
Foil enables creators to quickly stand up ML models and integrate them into user-facing applications. This is achieved through its unified novice-to-expert progression. Beginners start with Novice Mode, utilizing high-level templates and the multi-tiered Model Zoo to abstract away complex architecture, allowing rapid deployment and problem framing. As expertise develops, the tool progressively reveals more control, ensuring users are never forced to "graduate" to a different professional tool; Foil simply moves with their deepening skills.
Foil is implemented in C++ and provides a full creative coding and GUI framework, a dynamically typed JIT-compiled language, and tooling for data visualization and simulation. Foil is the cohesive platform that enables creators to build sophisticated, real-time, media-rich applications using machine learning without the usual DevOps friction or workflow fragmentation.