Notes from the machine room.
Raffael architects AI and agent platforms by day, and builds decentralised compute, language tooling, local-first apps, simulations, and games by night. Writing about agents and the platforms they run on, trust and determinism in software, and the history and economics of technology. Languages and models are tools. They serve humans, not the other way around.
Selected writing
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articleLearning to PlayEN中한
A chess prodigy's handbook, three old games and one laptop: rebuilding the ideas behind game-playing AI in Rust for a browser on my phone, and measuring them.
22 min read · 9 chapters
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articleThe River and the CanalEN中한
Agents explore the rugged world; workflows are what exploration leaves behind. Chess, StarCraft, a factory under the sea, and why I build an engine.
51 min read · 16 chapters
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reviewWin Everything, Control No OneEN中한
Sebastian Mallaby's biography of Demis Hassabis is the best history of modern AI I know, and an honest study of a man who hates control and exercises it.
17 min read · 10 chapters
Latest writing
All articles →-
noteMemory that dreams
A colleague showed me that agent memory should dream before Anthropic published on it. Replay the day, and check the notes against what happened.
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reviewIts Own Metaphor
Philip Ball's How Life Works is the popular science book I wish every other one were: deep, clear, and honest about how we came to know what we know.
10 min read · 6 chapters
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reviewAn Empire of PeopleEN中한
Karen Hao's Empire of AI tells the story of OpenAI through its people. Gripping as reporting, and uneven where it argues.
17 min read · 7 chapters
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noteSomething closer to a religion
In 2013 Sam Altman wrote that great founders create something closer to a religion. Karen Hao reads it as a warning; I read it as a forecast.
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noteSmall, focused, high-trust
Altman wanted OpenAI to stay small. Every large group spends more of its work holding itself together, and AI may change that arithmetic.
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noteIts magic crumbles away
Weizenbaum said a program's magic crumbles once it is explained. Karen Hao ends her book on it. True of ELIZA, not of language models.
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noteIntelligence is compression
Ilya Sutskever's internal slogan at OpenAI: a model that must predict the world has to compress it. I think it is the most useful definition we have.
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noteHow CRISPR works
Bacteria keep mug shots of the viruses that attacked them, and Cas9 uses them to cut. A 3D model to step through, from the discovery to the tool.
On my desk
Shiioo
A virtual company of AI agents on your Mac, run from your phone. Claude Code, Codex and local models work in their own branches; a rules file decides what they may do alone, and the rest reaches you on Telegram as a question.
Arcanist.sh
Haskell tooling in Rust: hx, a fast package manager, and bhc, a compiler with GC-free runtime profiles.
Archipelag.io
Decentralised AI compute on community-operated GPU hosts, in free open beta. Jobs prefer nearby hosts and a chosen region, and every job records where it ran.
Reading
A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett. Everything else I read, have read, and plan to read is in the reading log.
Projects
All projects →- Open beta
Archipelag.io Decentralized AI compute: AI jobs run on a network of community-operated GPU hosts. Jobs prefer nearby hosts and a preferred region, and every job records where it ran; strict regional enforcement is in development. In free open beta: hosts earn virtual credits while metering is validated, and real-money payouts are not enabled yet.
- Public alpha
Cyanea Bioinformatics notebooks that actually re-run. Write, run, and share analyses that execute in your browser on WebAssembly, with nothing to install. Every notebook, dataset, and output is a versioned snapshot you can run again. A Rust analysis stack underneath, 21 file formats built in. Open source, with self-hosting and federation on the way.
- Shipping
Arcanist Haskell tooling for the age of AI-authored code. hx is a fast package and project manager written in Rust, and bhc is a compiler built to check everything it can. With a registry that records what has been verified, they lead toward a commons where nobody, human or model, has to verify the same thing twice.
- Stable
Zentinel Security-first reverse proxy built to guard the free web. Rust on Cloudflare's Pingora, explicit configuration over hidden defaults, and WAF, auth and other policy in isolated agents, so a crashing agent leaves the proxy running. Agents for WAF, bot management, identity, API inspection and scripting, SDKs from Rust to Haskell, a pure Rust ModSecurity engine and a fleet control plane.