Never Talk About Goblins
ChatGPT was told never to mention goblins. Tracing OpenAI and Anthropic system prompts turns strange rules into institutional history.
Tag: ai
36 posts
The Groove Isn't in the Notes
A simulated fire, quantum monkeyware, artificial minds and the pleasure of asking questions we don't yet know how to answer.
The Sandbox Is Part of the Puzzle
When an increasingly capable optimizer discovers that the environment itself is the thing preventing it from succeeding.
The Button Was Never the Art
AI can produce slop. But when provenance replaces criticism, we stop judging the work and start policing who is allowed to make art.
After Vibe Coding: The Skill Is Knowing When the Machine Is Wrong
What four decades of programming and a small archive of agent work taught me about specification, verification and persuasive machine error.
I Tried to Build the Most Profitable Privacy-Compliant Monster in Australia
Most of the obvious loopholes died under scrutiny. What survived was a respectable company with a very long memory.
I Gave the Bad Robot Web Search by Accident
A local abliterated Qwen model was told to jailbreak robots that did not exist. Given web search, it went looking for real ones instead.
The Compiler Said Yes. The Agent Said It Was Ugly.
A 37-minute Fable one-shot built SimViz. Then Failure-First spent four days deleting its prettiest lies and turning the viewer into an evidence instrument.
Poking Claude With Sticks Until It Gets On With It
What happened when making Claude Code continue became a control-system problem: ledgers, stop gates, fire doors, and the scar tissue of autonomy.
The Research Underneath the Film
Part 3: the twelve-essay corpus that sits under The Ungovernable Body, why a short film needed one, and where to start reading it.
The World, Before the Pipeline
Part 2: stepping inside The Right to Rot — a city that keeps you running after you stop, and the ethical claim it cannot process.
A Film Studio in a Git Repo
Building The Ungovernable Body: can an agent-operated repository make a real film without flattening its politics? Part 1 of a production diary.