Building, testing, and thinking about AI

Longform essays on AI, human agency, and the systems we build with them — written from an unusual vantage point: an operator running a production system on LLMs every day, not a frontier lab or academia.

Start with the essay below, or read more about this site .

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• How do you know a correction held? Instrumenting an agent in production

  9 Jun, 2026

  Functional scars make a correction persist. They don't tell you whether the system as a whole is getting better. So I instrumented every session — deterministic, zero-token, never blocking — and let a monthly pass turn the evidence into mechanism changes. The first thing the data caught was me.

• The same scar, two agents

  3 Jun, 2026

  fscars 0.4.0 promotes the Codex adapter from instructions to native hooks. A correction you write once now fires deterministically in both Claude Code and Codex — and the scar itself does not change. Here is how each side works, and the one honest limitation.

• A month of functional scars: 934 fires, one broken validation loop, and what it cost

  26 May, 2026

  I wired ten functional scars into my own workspace and let them run for a month. Half the signal came from one hook with documented false positives, and 3,838 captured opportunities sat unread. Here are the numbers and what they forced me to build.

• Functional Scars — turning corrections into a primitive

  9 May, 2026

  fscars 0.1.0 is out — a bolt-on correction primitive for AI coding agents, built on the framework from the Lucy Syndrome paper. Apache 2.0, pip install fscars.

• The Lucy Syndrome: Why LLMs Forget Corrections

  10 Apr, 2026

  LLMs don't remember yesterday. That gap has a name, a causal mechanism, and a fix that doesn't require better memory.

• The Lucy Syndrome and AI

  9 Apr, 2026

  LLMs don't remember yesterday — and that gap has a name. A five-part essay on the Lucy Syndrome, functional scars, and what it takes for a production system to actually learn.

• Questions and answers

  9 Apr, 2026

  Questions about the Lucy Syndrome essay — its scope, its method, and what functional scars actually look like in operation. Compiled from real conversations and updated as new questions arrive.

• Where this came from

  9 Apr, 2026

  The informal companion to the Lucy Syndrome essay — how the observation started, how the system around it took shape, and why an operator in Paraguay ended up writing about model amnesia.