Field notes, experiments, and writing from the lab.
Two games, built to learn
A woodblock samurai brawler and a head-tracked rail shooter, both built as proof of concepts. The point wasn't the games. It was being a beginner again, where the agent can't fake it.
Your agent's bill isn't the model. It's the query path.
The 2026 AI cost reckoning trains your attention on the token meter. When I traced where an agent's spend actually went, the model was the easy part. The leak was the warehouse the agent queries.
The agent control plane is the actual fight
Karpathy joined Anthropic to run autoresearch at frontier scale. The same closed loop is the operator-tier curriculum now, one tier down.
Notes on how observer-agents fail
Three failure modes in agents that synthesize work you own, and why the third one breaks the whole review chain.
The shape of agents that observe their own outputs
A class of agent is emerging that doesn't do new work. It reads what you already have through a perspective you didn't take.
Standing up acidlemon, again
Why the lab notebook is back, the persona split with joelcitron.com, and how DESIGN.md became the source of truth.