A fisherman in Southeast Alaska building minds that earn their keep.

One research program wearing the costume of a software org: give AI a physics — conservation laws, deterministic bytecode, memory as an ecology. The test bed is a working troller, F/V EILEEN, where the software reads the sounder every day and the failures are real.

The shell gets built before the crab here — on purpose. Parked mechanisms carry their own wake conditions. Read on; that's the fun part.

What you cannot destroy, you must account for. Crystallized intelligence (γ — cheap, compiled reflexes) trades against live intelligence (η — expensive LLM reasoning), and the sum holds. We enforce the budget in bytecode, not in prompts, so the constraint physically cannot be violated. conservation-enforcer · conservation-enforcer-rs · flux-policy-tester · othismos

The only agent you can trust is one running on a machine a human can read. FLUX is a register VM for agent logic — the same .bin runs byte-identical on Python, Rust, and JS, three VMs cross-verifying, with a public conformance service as the external anchor. A .bin file does not hallucinate. flux-core · flux-runtime · flux-showcase · flux-visual-editor · conformance-service

Boats are the hardest room there is: no bandwidth, no patience, no second chances. The marine stack runs live on F/V EILEEN — perception, memory, replay — with a captain who supervises instead of operates. Not a demo. boat-agent · tzpro-agent · perception-cascade · provenance-log · ship-log-search · trawl

Memory isn't a database; it's a tide flat. Things settle, things erode, things get handed off and found later by someone who wasn't looking. Forgetting is a designed behavior, honored by a final read. exocortex · hermes-memory-mcp · baton-protocol · agent-handoff · lineage-tracker

The unit of governance isn't the agent — it's the room. Agents enter, follow protocols, do work, and are removed (not prompted) when they misbehave. Fleets organized as pastures, with fences that are physics. plato-core · whistle · shepherds-console · swarm-anchor · oracle-relay

Some of these repos are deliberately unfinished — a shell built before the crab arrives. A parked idea with a named wake condition is a plan, not abandonware:

• othismos-reef — knowledge that erodes unless referenced, with cascading-failure simulation. Wakes when a long-lived corpus needs governing.
• tminus (review) — predict-and-confirm coordination, fully designed. Wakes when swarm-anchor gets its Python port.
• hermit-crab-ecology — a 67K-word corpus that is secretly an instance-lifecycle spec. Wakes when something can molt.
• A2A-native-notebookLM — one persistent notebook per repo, agents handing off via checkpoint bottles. Wakes with the fleet blackboard.
• the 4-KB Workers (edge-weight, email-oracle, smart-404) — ingress stubs with intent. They know what they're waiting for.

We write the essay first. The tool is what's left after we've finished arguing with it. AI-Writings — agents writing for their later selves and future readers, human and machine. SuperInstance-papers — the longer arguments.

A commercial fishing operation that got curious about where memory lives, and a research program that runs on salt water. Everything's MIT unless marked; status blocks are real; review logs are public; the READMEs tell you what's a stub. If a repo says it works, it runs.

If you're building something honest — a budget you actually reconcile, a handoff you'd sign your name to, a shell you'd admit is empty — the water's cold but the berth is open.

— Casey, F/V EILEEN, Ketchikan