Notes on .NET, XAF, and building things

Twenty years of XPO, application frameworks, and lately a lot of applied AI. 364 articles and counting.

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Oct 28, 202612 min read

Three Trucks After a Flood (Creatura, Part 4)

Three trucks, each a Creatura agent with its own ledger, carry supplies to four villages after a flood. One road lies, one fuel gauge lies, and a judge reads only the world. Three fixes and one shared warning took the convoy from 1,406 to 1,500 units delivered and from 262 lies acted on to 45.

Oct 28, 202610 min read

Four Hypotheses That Failed (Creatura, Part 3)

Before Creatura's agents touch the real world, they are tested in emulated worlds that lie, judged by an oracle they cannot fool, against hypotheses written before the code. The first battery had seven hypotheses. Four failed. Here is what each failure taught.

Oct 28, 202611 min read

One Loop, Three Minds (Creatura, Part 2)

Creatura has one agent loop, not three. The model never touches the world directly: a control layer offers it only the tools it may see, checks every effect against the facts, and catches the tool that lies. Bach, Levin and Peterson differ only in what they put into the loop's slots, and the seat in the middle can hold a model, a trained network or a plain planner. Part 2 of the Creatura series: the architecture.

Oct 28, 20268 min read

The Birth of Creatura: An Agent Framework Built on the Road

Creatura is a C# framework for building AI agents, training them, and testing them in emulated worlds. Two weeks traveling through China with a friend, conversations with Joscha Bach and Michael Levin on the Lex Fridman Podcast, a book by Jordan Peterson, and a few late nights of programming became Creatura, my new agent framework. Part 1 of a series: how it began.

Oct 28, 202612 min read

How Do You Price Software When AI Writes the Code?

Rethinking the economics of custom software development in an era where implementation is becoming cheaper, but understanding the problem remains essential.

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Oct 27, 20265 min read

SyncFramework 3.0: .NET 10, an in-memory client and an official MySQL provider

BIT.Data.Sync 3.0.0 and the SyncFramework EF Core packages 10.0.0 are on nuget.org. Everything targets .NET 10. There is a new in-memory client that needs no HTTP, an official MySQL provider, five bug fixes, and one small binary break.

Oct 23, 20268 min read

Agents That Defend Goals: What Two Scientists and an Engineer Taught Me About Building Agents

I turned three accounts of what a mind is, and who should own one, into agents in C#: a colony of controllers from Michael Levin, a self-model from Joscha Bach, a hybrid of both, and an owned critic from George Hotz. Then I put them in worlds that lie and on real code with a live model in the seat. The biology turned out to be scaffolding. Five rules did the work, and one of them carried all the weight: write the goal as evidence the agent cannot author.

Oct 23, 202613 min read

Agents That Defend Goals, Part 7: The citizen's agent

George Hotz's rules for owning a machine, turned into a C# critic that earns the right to interrupt, cites the registry, and answers to one person.

Oct 23, 20267 min read

Agents That Defend Goals, Part 6: Worlds that lie

How the permit office, the irrigation turn and the cattle lot are built so that the registry, not the agent, is the judge. And how to build the next one.

Oct 23, 20268 min read

Agents That Defend Goals, Part 5: The control layer on Microsoft Agent Framework

Five rules as function middleware around a real model, and the benchmark finding that the plumbing bounds the architecture.