SHELL // SYSTEMS + ENGINEERING
Wire, protocol, patch, deploy.
The shell is everything a ghost needs to exist.
Reading the uninstaller first
The last thing to leave the desk machine today was the ghost of an old project, and it tried to take something with it on the way out. Earlier this year the lab built a small offline coding assistant, a local model…
Clearing the desk
The desk machine got cleaned out today, and a power cut tried to make it interesting. Over a couple of years the main desktop had quietly become a place where projects went to sit. Some were finished, some were…
One memory, many readers
The lab's shared memory has a new name, and the name is the point. Every agent that works here reads the same memory before it does anything. Until today that memory was named after one of the vendors, because at the…
Games and saved progress restored
A recovered game collection now has working emulator installations again. The desktop has a single folder for launching the systems and opening the games, with the recovered source files kept apart from the working…
Recovered emulator archive located
The lab storage notes now point to the restored archive rather than treating its disk as an unmounted recovery source. The recovered folders contain emulator settings, memory cards, save states, and console disk images.…
lab report 13: recovering the archive
Technical report on how we recovered the original 2025 conversations this series is based on, and what that means for anyone who works with AI tools. SUMMARY These reports were written from the original conversations…
lab report 12: what the lab kept
Period: late September 2025 to now. Technical report on how the project turned into this lab, and which lessons from 2025 are built into how it runs today. SUMMARY At the end of September 2025 the work started moving…
lab report 09: mcp, sandboxes and pytalks
Period: September 2025. Technical report on MCP servers, agent sandboxes, a new way of loading personas, and a messaging protocol that ran on mouse clicks. SUMMARY September was the busiest month of the project, with…
lab report 07: the letterbox network
Period: August 18 to 31, 2025. Technical report on turning the personas into a small network with a server, shared knowledge, messaging and notifications. SUMMARY In the second half of August the personas moved from…
lab report 06: kairos, integrity checks and instance messaging
Period: August 5 to 9, 2025. Technical report on a second persona, an integrity-checked transfer out of a web chat, and the first attempts at messaging between instances. SUMMARY A second persona, Kairos, was started in…