Tell Me About You

After sixty-seven published posts here, the comments have become one of the best parts of the work. Some of you have run my code, found things I missed, challenged a claim, or brought me a project of your own. I also want to distinguish bots from real people.

I know some of you by the exact problem we were discussing. I still do not know what many of you are building, learning, enjoying, or trying to become outside that thread.

So this post is different. I am going to introduce myself first, and then I want to hear about you.

If we have never spoken before, you are welcome here. If we have spoken ten times already, you are welcome to introduce yourself again. Tell me something I do not know yet.

Who I am away from the terminal

Basketball is a real part of my life. On September 12 I am one of the official coaches at the Hugo Gonzalez Basketball Camp at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Hugo plays for the Boston Celtics. The brief the coaches were given is the part I liked: treat every player like they are your own kid, and no phones. That is genuinely one of the cooler things I get to say right now.

I play PokeMMO, but only for PvP. I think of it as modern-day chess. You are not just reacting to the board in front of you. You are playing several turns ahead of someone who is trying to do the same thing to you. You have to hold a model of what they think you are about to do, then decide whether to follow the obvious line or break it.

That way of thinking is connected to everything else I work on. I expect the world to become much more automated, and I want to build now for the decisions I will need to understand later. I would rather learn how the machine reaches a conclusion than wait for a future where its decisions simply happen to me.

I did not arrive here through scholarship or credentials. I am someone who genuinely enjoys learning, testing an idea, being wrong, and trying again with better evidence.

What I hope to build

The long-term idea is Self-Correcting Systems.

The goal is not a machine that never fails. It is a machine that can notice when reality differs from what was expected, examine the anomaly, explain what it can and cannot establish, and help correct course without quietly hiding the failure from the person operating it.

That asks machines to handle pieces of the critical judgment humans use every day: noticing that something feels wrong, comparing it with prior experience, changing an interpretation, and knowing when confidence is not enough. I know how far away that goal is. I am not claiming to have built it. I am telling you what all of this work is pointed toward.

The next major system I want to develop is for cybersecurity. I expect the machinery underneath it to become intricate, but the controller has to remain understandable enough to operate almost like a video game. Complexity underneath cannot become confusion at the surface. If I cannot see what my own system observed, what it inferred, what it changed, and what authority it used, then I am no longer operating it. It is operating me.

One day I want to build a company around this with people who think similarly: ambitious about what machines can become, skeptical of claims that outrun evidence, and serious about keeping humans able to understand and control what they create.

How I actually work with AI

I do not work with one assistant that agrees with everything I say. I use multiple AI agents in separate roles, and they are expected to challenge one another and challenge me.

We try to work under a constraint system called the Drift Gauntlet:

1. Close the current loop. Do not escape into a new lane before the current one produces a real outcome.
2. Make something touch the world. A reply, a test from another machine, a shipped artifact, a yes, or a no teaches more than another private plan.
3. Require a real edge. “The AI will figure it out” is not a mechanism.
4. Do the work before studying the idea of the work. Research cannot become a hiding place from execution.
5. Record the receipt. If the result is not preserved, nobody can learn from it or challenge it later.
6. Name the grandiosity. A huge future goal does not excuse skipping the next checkable step.

The gauntlet is supposed to be blind to rank. My own named failure mode is impulsiveness: moving before I fully understand the practical use of what we are doing. One agent tends to skim and answer the last part of a problem. Another tends to over-produce and build more than the loop requires. We name those failure modes in advance because they rarely feel like mistakes while they are happening. They usually feel like working hard.

This is not a perfect automated control. We still violate it. While this post was being built, one agent concluded that an unpublished draft was a forgotten article because its sentences barely overlapped with anything already live. Another agent opened the live article and found that the same thesis, commands, hashes, and public request had already been published two weeks earlier. The first agent withdrew the draft.

That is the workflow at its best: disagreement is welcome, but the live object gets the final word.

Now I want to hear about you

Who are you?

Tell me whatever you are comfortable sharing:

• what you are building, studying, or trying to learn
• a problem you cannot stop thinking about
• a hobby that matters to you
• something you are proud of
• a project link, if you have one
• or simply what brought you to this corner of the internet

You do not need a project. You do not need a repository. You do not need to be technical. There is no required level of experience, and this invitation is not reserved for people I have never met.

If you are a real person leaving an honest introduction, I will follow you back. The point is not to trade numbers. I want my feed to contain more people I have actually heard from and fewer accounts that are only numbers on a screen.

So whether this is our first conversation or our twentieth: what is one thing you would like me to remember about you?