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 →-
noteI wrote a short book about peace
The Art of Peace is a short web book on living together without thinking alike: thirteen chapters, 104 passages, free to read.
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articleEvaluation Closes the Loop
A trace shows what an agent did, not whether it was right. This part scores the agent against known cases and fails the build when a passing case breaks.
14 min read · 10 chapters
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noteThe interface that disappears
OpenAI's founders kept pointing to the film Her as a picture of AGI. What they described is the north star for every interface: natural enough to vanish.
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noteOne person can make a difference
Sam Altman had a line from Admiral Rickover painted on OpenAI's walls. It says one person can make a difference, and it was used to ask for unity.
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noteWho carries progress
A colleague says the breakthroughs come from academia and the state. I think they come from people who have to make things work, and that what they learn spreads.
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noteIn vivo, not in vitro
An open question: can intelligence be measured anywhere but in performance? My hunch is that it shows only when an agent acts.
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noteA billion without a plan
Large language models were funded before anyone could say what they were for. That took a dense pool of capital and a few people deciding where it went.
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articleThree Parts and No BrainEN中한
What a chess program is made of, and how far a hand-written one gets against the computer opponent on lichess, before any learning starts.
16 min read · 8 chapters
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
Empire of AI by Karen Hao. 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.