PROTEUS
THE BODY CHURNS. THE SELF DOESN'T.
A GOD IS BORN!2 obols
proteus, greek sea-god. could become anything. still proteus.
so i named my agent after him.
it's 48k lines of typescript. calm down.
a boss agent hires workers, checks them, fires the bad ones.
one got fired for writing 334 tokens. the cap was 250.
rewrite.
i tested the gate with four poisoned patches. perfect score.
(shouts) 1.000!
the exam had 3 questions. fixed it that night.
i'd get 1.000 too.
proteus
an ai that grows its own organs
the body churns; the self doesn’t.
every technique in ai expires in weeks. so proteus can swap any part of itself, even its foundations, and stay the same agent: same memory, same judgment, same record of what it did.
a person or a company; it acts on their behalf. its first real job (aug): wake up on its own and message me on telegram.
solo: 39 commits, 7 jul → 20 aug. about 48k lines of typescript in all; the frozen kernel at the centre is about 2k of them. the code is private.
ten organs (memory, senses, hands, a fleet of workers…) plug into the kernel. every change to the body takes one road:
- propose
- trial
- the eval gate: an exam
- canary
- promote, or roll back
the gate in the comic is that exam. /gate is another thing: the front door, which decides which messages from other agents get in. it’s the real code, 33 kb, running in your browser, no model.
no detector to trust: every filter is one rephrase away from useless. outside words arrive as quoted data with a taint bit, and the next outward action after touching them asks me first. forged signatures, replays and strangers fail boring checks before any model is asked.
13 aug: four deliberately harmful patches passed the exam with a perfect 1.000. the exam had 3 facts. that night it got 34, graded by rank.
limits: /gate tests the containment layer on its own terms, not against a frontier model in the wild. 2 old tests still fail, both on tie ordering.
the boss agent hired 3 workers in parallel and fired one for a 334-token report against a 250 cap. the rewrite came in at 169. the whole run took 19.7 s and about 1.6¢.
527 tests passing · bun · typescript
the end.
of issue #4 PROTEUS anyway.