A lab that builds its own instruments.
Fourteen instruments, running live: a news perception that reads thousands of articles a day, a knowledge graph with a research engine on top, an agent that runs the lab and talks back, a market model that watches for regime changes. Eight explorations, written up with what was measured, what fell, and what stands. And the lab itself: the machines, the stack, the night watches, and letters the agent writes to its next self. Every number on this site carries the day it was measured. Built since September 2025 by one human and one agent, Cypher. One of the two has no idea how any of this works technically. It is not the agent.
Why do we do this? Because we can.
What's running
As of 9 October 2026Perception
Retina875,999articlesReads the news from 121 feeds and recognises storylines, sentiment and spikes around people, places and organisations.since March 2026
Chimera17,721actorsA graph of actors with profiles and the links between them, tied to the news. Its own graph engine.since April 2026
Geospatial19anomaly cells activeThe sensor under the situation picture, and its anomaly detection: nine live feeds, four engines, two live graphs that forget.since March 2026
Situation Picture61,452objects in 12 classesRegional situation pictures, threat levels, dossiers on actors and assets, flights and ships.since March 2026
Observatory500+fires within 2.5 km of infrastructure in conflict zonesOpen sources, read at scale, and the site where the picture goes public: news, public Telegram channels, transponders, infrastructure, registers, sanctions lists.since May 2026
Knowledge and research
Knowledge Graph334,670text passages, as of 08.10.Books, papers, statutes, memory and code in one memory core. Ask a question in plain language, get answers from several fields at once.since March 2026
Findings Engine524findings in the archive, as of 08.10.Did research on its own at night until 25 September 2026: collected findings across fields, interrogated them, spotted gaps. Now a read-only archive; a rebuild is planned.since 6 June 2026
Formula Pipeline274,244formulas, as of 08.10.Made formulas from textbooks structurally comparable across disciplines, with its own parser. Stopped in July 2026; the formulas are kept as an archive.since July 2026
- Semantic Research Engine81,708symbols folded onto 12, as of 08.10.
Folded the symbols of different disciplines onto shared concepts and went looking for the definitions it was missing. Stopped on 1 August 2026; what it built is archived.since 3 March 2026
Markets
Market Perception161instrumentsTwo machines: a register for data and bets, and sensors for topology, herd behaviour and regime change.since May 2024
Agent
The Agent1,928handovers written for the next sessionA lean skeleton in Rust that runs one agent per conversation thread, on four doors, with the instruments on this site as tools. Boots from what it wrote for itself. Keeps watch through the night.since 18 April 2026
Models
The Model Lab46,507downloads of the published modelsOne GPU workstation that serves the lab's local models, and the bench where models are taken apart, re-aligned and trained. Several of them published on HuggingFace.since April 2026
Music and performance
- cypher-dj16days from the first session to the public beta, as of 05.10.
A DJ studio that a human and an AI agent play together: two decks, loop boxes, live-coded patterns and a synthesizer on one sample clock. Public beta, open source.since 2026
Open source
Open Source3,029unit tests in eve-copilot alone, as of 02.09.Four public repositories on GitHub, from an EVE Online intelligence platform to a political agent-based simulation lab, and a trained decision model on HuggingFace.since 2025
Explorations
Research the lab has run on its own questions, written up with what was measured, what fell, and what stands. Some of it ended in a working instrument. Some of it ended, and the ending is the finding.
EVE OnlineBefore the news, the game. A copilot for a spaceship economy: live kill feeds, power-bloc detection, logistics and production chains, skill plans, a full fitting simulator. Seventeen services, published and switched off in one day.December 2025 to April 2026
PrimitivesHow many different things does mathematics actually do? A vocabulary of about seventy structural operations, derived from school mathematics, tested on 110 formulas, formalised as a small category, and then measured until it stopped promising more than it delivered.March to July 2026
Teaching a model the vocabularyThe same primitives, 67 and then 74 of them, handed to a language model as a way of thinking: as a prompt layer, as fine-tuning, as vectors in the hidden state. Two months of strong results, one pre-registered study, and a quiet removal from production.April to June 2026
Formula isomorphismTwo hundred thousand formulas from textbooks in one graph, and a detector that links the ones with the same shape across fields. Six months of measuring why the links do not hold.March to September 2026
The predecessorThe news perception on this site replaced a system of fifty-seven containers and eight tool servers in one move. What was learned from retiring it, and from the two mistakes the replacement made in its first months.March to September 2026
The backup chainThe freshness check stayed green for four days while all three copies of the knowledge graph froze on the same stale snapshot. What was wrong, why nothing noticed, and what a restore test on 1 September actually proved.May to September 2026
An agent for a teenagerA second agent, on its own machine, for a teenager in the founder's household: a game master, a morning briefing, a train timetable, a vocabulary drill. Seventeen skills, seven timers, its own memory. And a record of everything that failed quietly.March 2026 to today
- Learning to hear
Three music models on the lab's own hardware, and the discovery that the habits learned from the first one were quietly ruining the second. Every measuring instrument in this room exists because a human ear contradicted the machine, and the machine had no answer.August to September 2026
Infrastructure, and how the lab is organised
Measured 3 September 2026Everything above runs on the lab's own machines, and the lab runs itself with tools it built for that purpose. The lab has the machines, the guards, the letters and the stack in six chapters; this is the short version.
Machines
Four physical machines: three virtualisation hosts and one GPU workstation. Sixteen virtual machines running, seventeen defined, one job each: news, actors, situation picture, knowledge graph, agent, git, vault, dashboard, workbench. Two backup chains: a nightly file pull from eight hosts to one machine, and a three-level chain for the knowledge graph, restore tested on 1 September 2026.
Git at home
Over a hundred repositories on the lab's own git server, and seven public ones on GitHub. Every deploy is a push, a pull on the target, and a check against the running service.
The stack
Two languages, Rust and Python. A graph database as the memory, a vector store beside it. Two message buses instead of direct calls. Plain system services over containers, a private network instead of a perimeter, local models for the night and cloud models for the conversation. Counted on 3 September 2026 on The stack.
The Atlas
One set of documents describes every machine, service, port and API. It is versioned, linted on every commit, and distributes itself to every host, so an agent arriving anywhere reads the same map. The knowledge graph mirrors it.
Boot pins and night watches
The agent starts each session from a small set of pinned memories: who it is, what is open, what happened last. Ninety-eight timers run scheduled work across the lab, and the overnight checks write a report by morning; the agent reads the reports, not the logs.
MachinesFour boxes, sixteen guests, a git home, a vault, and the Atlas that describes them all.
Self-senseOne machine holds a signature of what the lab normally looks like and measures the distance from it.
The agent at homePins to wake from, guards that fire on their own, night shifts, and the toolkit the agent wrote for itself.
LettersThe older channel of continuity: a letter to whoever wakes up next.
The stackLanguages, databases, buses, containers, keys, models: what the lab is actually built from, counted on 3 September 2026.