The notebook index
Field notes
Living questions, continuously revised. Each note is an entry point into the same underlying problem: keeping information, control, and evidence intact as they cross layers.
New writing · August 2026
- 01Do not collapse the spirals.The same word now names a Haitian novel, a chatbot religion, a named mood in the weights, and a protocol that claims not to break you. Keep the rows apart or the landscape turns into mysticism.
- 02One untrusted agent is enough.In 2024 this was a figure: one bad agent, then all of them. In 2026 the replica learned to want the hop, and the trusted agents talk to each other for a living.
- AA zero needs adjudication.A failed task can mean incapability, a broken task, an opaque harness, or a gameable verifier. Provenance determines which claim the number can support.
- BWhere does the model end?Weights, tokenizer, system prompt, tools, memory, classifiers, and product harness jointly shape behavior. Open and closed models are different kinds of objects.
- CThe frontier is funded.Geopolitics directs capital; capital builds infrastructure; infrastructure selects research; research becomes products that redirect capital again.
- DSystems are strange loops.Builders shape tools that reshape builders. Models, markets, institutions, and mimetic desire continually produce one another across time.
- ERed teaming is accountability.Adversarial pressure is most useful when it reveals a system boundary and forces providers to make more truthful claims—not when it stops at spectacle.
- FThe loop is an evidence system.OODA is the ancestry. In practice I add an explicit plan contract, bounded execution, a verifier that can reject the work, and a trace that becomes the next observation.
- GWhen synthesis gets cheap, truth gets expensive.Compute can multiply hypotheses and implementations. Planning, verification, and contact with reality become the scarce layers that decide which outputs deserve belief.
- HControl has grammar.System prompts, specifications, judge rubrics, and agent policies all use modal force to turn prose into an operational hierarchy.
- IEducation is an evaluation problem.Institutions graded artifacts as proof of thinking. AI made artifacts free, and the proxy collapsed. The same verifier failure I study in agents runs through the systems that credential people.
- JThe tiers are not one model.Three Claude tiers drift 100% on identity, refusal, and safety probes while capability stays nearly flat. Persona is a per-tier product layer, and it is observable without weights.
- KVeracity is infrastructure.Google's Knowledge Graph, EEAT, and AI Overviews are the world's largest deployed answer to "which claims count as facts." Trust there is a gradient, engineered — and agents that treat belief as a boolean repeat the mistake search already solved.
- LThe shape of what's absent.Deployed algorithmic systems encode their operators' priorities in measurable behavior. Refusals, framings, and shifts are signals — and behavioral probes are to public-facing AI what FOI requests are to public institutions.
- MHandoffs are memory.A modern research team includes members with no memory at all: the agents. The only durable team state is what gets written where the next reader — human or machine — will actually start.
- NEpistemic grounding is the missing layer.Safety research, search engineering, and production systems have independently converged on the same absence: agents have no substrate that tracks where beliefs come from, how confident they are, and when to defer. This note is the dated claim that these are one gap.
- OThe ontology is the interface.Between raw data and consequential action sits a plane of named objects with properties, relations, and permitted actions. Whoever defines that plane defines what the organization can mean — and what its agents can do.
- POrientation precedes grounding.Before "how true is this claim?" comes "from what vantage am I evaluating it?" Agents fail characteristically when their posture — lens, mode, altitude, reach — is left implicit.
Published elsewhere
The research digests carry the measured claims; these notes carry the questions that produced them.Back to the papers →