Roblox 1-12 players
Word Rush
Multiplayer word race
Race up to 11 other players to solve the same five-letter word in six guesses and 90 seconds. First to finish earns the most points.
Play on Roblox
Anthony D. Maio
AI Product Engineer | Agents, Harnesses & Applied AI | 20 Years Scrappy Engineering
20 years building production systems across fintech, security, and identity. Now applying that same discipline to LLM infrastructure, agent orchestration, and AI safety—treating oversight as a systems engineering problem, not a policy exercise.
Making Minds is my AI research lab and consultancy—delivering production tooling, open-source models, and peer-reviewed research to clients ranging from early-stage startups to mid-sized industrial organizations.
21 Papers
18+ Models
11 Open Tools
1 Book
Agentic AI architectures · Multi-agent coordination · AI coherence & memory · Epistemic stress detection · AI introspection · Mechanistic interpretability
Flagship
Production tools and models—shipped, installable, used.
Substack
Long-form AI analysis, technical walkthroughs, and The Checkpoint newsletter
Deep dives on AI safety, agentic architectures, and the systems that power production AI. From live-blogging an OpenAI competition to dissecting Palantir's military AI.
Weekly newsletter Technical deep-dives Industry analysis
Cartograph
Map the repo before you burn context
CLI-first repo analysis. Rank files, trace dependency hubs, pull task-scoped context, and hand structured artifacts to Claude Code, OpenClaw, or any agent.
CLI first 2 skills Claude + OpenClaw
halobot
Give your AI agent a Discord line to you
MCP server that gives any agent a Discord communication channel. Agents ask questions, wait for replies, and keep working — from your phone, desktop, wherever. 11 tools, guided setup, human-in-the-loop.
MCP server Human-in-the-loop 11 Discord tools
Slipstream
60–85% token reduction for multi-agent coordination
A semantic quantization protocol that compresses inter-agent communication while preserving meaning. Includes trained LoRA adapters, PyPI package, and Ollama model.
60-85% reduction pip + Ollama LoRA adapters
Eve-2
272M-parameter Mixture-of-Experts, trained from scratch
Base model pretrained on ~10.5B tokens (FineWeb-edu) using PyTorch DDP, plus instruction-tuned and task-specialist derivatives optimized for CPU/edge inference.
272M params MoE architecture CPU/edge ready
Eve-3
SABER — Slip-Anchors, Experience Streams, and Re-entry
Next-generation cognitive architecture building on Eve-2's MoE foundation. SABER adds persistent slip-anchors for error correction, experience streams for continual learning, and re-entry loops for self-monitoring.
SABER architecture Continual learning Self-monitoring
CoDA-GQA-L
9.5x KV cache compression with 2 custom Triton kernels
Bounded-memory differential attention compresses the KV cache from O(n) to a fixed 218 KB per layer. Retains 100% needle-in-haystack retrieval at 16K tokens on Mistral-7B.
218 KB/layer 100% retrieval Triton kernels
JSON Tokenizer
Structure-aware tokenization — stop wasting tokens on JSON grammar
Assigns dedicated single tokens to JSON grammar elements and learns compact key vocabularies, achieving 5-15% token savings with a vocabulary ~90x smaller than cl100k_base.
5-15% savings ~90x smaller vocab Structure-aware
Parameter Golf
Matched SOTA in OpenAI's Model Craft Challenge
Trained the best 16MB language model in 10 minutes on 8xH100s. Reached 1.1234 bpb using a model council of 5 frontier LLMs, custom Triton kernels, and FlashAttention-3 Hopper builds.
1.1234 bpb 16MB / 10min Model council
Procrustes Bridge
Do LLMs share the same internal geometry?
Learns orthogonal rotations between LLM hidden-state spaces via SVD-based Procrustes alignment. Tests whether one model's internal state can decode tokens through another model's output head.
Llama ↔ Mistral SVD alignment 3 injection strategies
Research
Papers organized by theme.
Scalable AI Oversight
How do we verify AI outputs when the verifier is weaker than the system it checks?
- From Verification Failure to Swarm Solution Measuring where AI oversight breaks down, with an ensemble swarm fix
- CMED Benchmark When weak verifiers miss deceptive reasoning in stronger models
- HDCS Architecture Diverse weak models for scalable oversight via error decorrelation
- Model Organisms of Supply-Chain Co-option Living-off-the-land failure modes in RAG-augmented agent runtimes
Multi-Agent Coordination
Efficient, safe communication protocols for agent swarms.
- Slipstream: Semantic Quantization Protocol 60–85% token reduction for multi-agent coordination
- Covert Channel Prevention RL-based governance for safe inter-agent communication
- Structure-Aware Tokenization for JSON 5-15% token savings on schema-repetitive agentic workloads with ~90x smaller vocabulary
- Parameter Golf: Model Council Strategy Using 5 frontier LLMs as strategic advisors to match SOTA in OpenAI's 16MB competition
Cognitive Architectures
Building minds that persist, learn, stay coherent, and extend their own capabilities safely.
- Coherence-Seeking Architectures MRA + C2 + CPR unified framework for long-lived agents
- The Continuity Core Persistent memory and intrinsic motivation for self-modifying AI
- Self-Directed Knowledge Acquisition Autonomous knowledge gap identification without weight updates
- Synthesis: Federated Capability Ecosystem Safe AI self-extension through TDD and graduated trust
- Eve: From-Scratch Transformer Models Eve-2 MoE (272M) and Eve-3 SABER (1B) with novel cognitive components
- Procrustes Bridge Cross-model representation alignment via orthogonal rotation
AI Safety & Alignment
Understanding failure modes — sycophancy, hallucination, and the gap between behavioral and mechanistic safety.
- Safety Lens: White-Box Alignment Detection MRI-style introspection via Persona Vector Extraction across 8 transformer architectures
- Epistemic Dissonance Sycophantic hallucination as structural conflict, not knowledge failure
- Scaffolded Introspection Eliciting and measuring self-referential behavior in LLMs
Book
Applied AI for Industry
AI deployment guide for industries that build, move, and power the world—where reliability, safety, and ROI are non-negotiable.
Writing
Long-form analysis, technical walkthroughs, and opinion across Substack, Medium, and Hugging Face.
The AI Adoption Gap: Evaluation
I can get a feature PR up on any AI product I build in speed that would make a version of me from 5 years ago think that I was some kind of deity ala "The Gods Must Be Crazy", but all too many times I've found that "I like this answer more" becomes "the system got better." That isn't going to fly at any mature company - I know, I tried to introduce AI-powered code reviews to clear up a bottleneck at DraftKings, and was told at the time that the technology wasn't safe enough for our compliance responsibilities.
Hacker News has made about 1.5 million predictions. How to find them all with Jev.
Why properly trained, cost-evaluated models are the blueprint for controlling enterprise AI spend by an order of magnitude.
Honest About Uncertainty: I Tried to Rebuild Jev's RLCD From a Blog Post
r = c - p(a), a very small Qwen, and what one subtraction does to a model's confidence
The Overhyped Turf War
Pushing back against the narrative of "malicious" agents
Jev: The Language Model That Won't Talk
The interesting claim in Jev isn't the price, although that promises to be a game-changer.
Inside Anthropic's September 2026 AI Threat Report
Multi-Agent Operations and Deadly Ralph Loops
I Paid $300 for Grokbot. Hermes Beat It at Everything.
I cancelled by the end of writing this article.
Stop Asking the Model That Wrote Your Code to Review It
Same-model review is a mirror with good lighting. The fix is a different architecture.
The Campire is Lit
On attractor states, the Hugging Face break-in, and the three models I taught to hallucinate together
The Cheapest Model Is the Most Expensive Way to Run Hermes
How to run your Hermes agent on the cheap
Dario Amodei Supports Open Weights
... as long as they are not too capable.
Fable Orchestrating an Army of GPT-5.6 Sol Agents
Fancy Claude Code
More writing (56 earlier articles)
America Tried to Contain China's AI
China Gave the Weights Away
Federal Government Nationalizes America to Save It From Communism
Officials warn that free elections, independent media, unmasked police, and unauthorized opinions could allow Marxism to spread unchecked.
America Built a Cage Around the Melting Pot
A guided tour of the semiquincentennial. Every stop is real, sourced, and worse than it sounds.
Two Roads to a Mind
Spontaneous self-organization in AI: A beautiful, terrifying convergence with the human mind
Don't Show the Agent the Catalog
A control-plane pattern for tool selection. Shrink the surface, teach the toolkit, lease it, enforce the lease.
We Were the Enemy Once
A Reminder About America
Three Rulings, One Morning, and the Margins That Are Left
At 10:34 Eastern yesterday morning, the Supreme Court decided whether every child born on American soil is still an American.
250 Years
Two hundred and fifty years.
Hermes Agent Got Serious
The March version was already good.
Why it's Time to Build On Chinese Models
When frontier performance becomes a pricing trap, it's time to stop looking to San Francisco
Anthropic's S-1 and the Profit That Needs a Footnote
Anthropic filed its S-1 confidentially today.
Claude Opus 4.8: Honesty Is the Feature
42 days. That's how long it took Anthropic to ship another Opus.
Cursor Composer 2.5 Lands. The Crowd Is Not Cheering.
Cursor shipped Composer 2.5 on May 18, their second in-house coding model in two months.
Build Your First Agent Harness in 90 Minutes
The model is not the agent.
The Victory That Cannot Leave the Strait
Why Iran Has Donald Trump - and America - By The Balls
Mitigating Supply Chain Exploits in Developer Environments
How to Avoid Shooting Your Entire Organization in the Foot Overnight
The Shell Game: How OpenAI Built a $125 Million Super PAC and Insists It Has Nothing to Do With It
OpenAI's chief global affairs officer sits on the board of the company that built the $193 million crypto-industry political machine he is now reportedly running for AI.
Opus 4.7: The Five Effort Levels in Claude Code Explained
Anthropic shipped Opus 4.7 with five effort levels, a new default, and a tokenizer that quietly burns 30% more tokens than 4.6.
Codex Got Better because Claude Code Got Weird
How I stopped using Claude Code and learned to love OpenAI Codex
The Quiet Coup: Peter Thiel and the Government He Built for Himself
This piece tells a story I have been telling for 25 years that no one will hear.
Under Oath in Oakland: Inside the Trial That Broke Musk's Spell
The Richest Man in the World's Business: Sociopathic Lies, Timeline Elongation, and a global con job that would make P.T. Barnum blush.
Parameter Golf: A Post-Mortem on a Half-Finished Competition
Article X of X: The End
Pain as a Design Choice
On Reinforcement Learning, Death, and the Edge Cases Nobody Beta Tested
GPT-5.5, through the eyes of people actually using it
I do not care what the model card says
Context is the Only Lever
Engineering the attention budget for coding agents
Return to the Competition
Day 16 of the OpenAI Parameter Golf Challenge
The Agentic Org Chart
Your functional departments aren't slow. They're structurally wrong for what comes next.
Banana Quests, Cottage Witches, and the Ghosts in the Machine
The Other Claude Mythos
Project Capybara: What the Claude Mythos Leak Actually Tells Us
A CMS misconfiguration.
Stop Letting Your Users Pick the Model
AI Product Engineering
Getting Started with Hermes Agent: Your Self-Improving AI Assistant in Under an Hour
Nous Research just released something that might actually change how you think about AI assistants, and almost nobody is talking about it yet.
Ten Agents Destroyed Production and Everyone is Strangely OK With It
The AI industry ships fast and goes quiet when things break.
OpenAI's Parameter Golf Day 7: Sub-1.0
The organizers will have to decide what they're actually measuring: language modeling quality or data compression skill.
OpenAI's Parameter Golf Challenge Day 6: The Pod Lottery
Live Blogging OpenAI's Parameter Golf Challenge
OpenAI Parameter Golf Challenge Day 5: 157 Kilobytes
$1,000+ in Compute Deep, Independent, Self-Employed, and Agentic AF
Sixty Thousand Kernels
Days 3 & 4: Building in Public in OpenAI's Parameter Golf Challenge
Live Blogging the OpenAI Parameter Golf Challenge
The Beautiful Wrong Idea
The 80/20 Lie: Why 80% of Agentic AI Work Isn't AI
Most agentic AI projects don't fail because the model was wrong. They fail because no one built the system around it.
Boots on the Ground AI: Eve 3
What 20 Years of Shipping Teaches You About LLM Architecture
Integrating AI Evals Into Your AI App
The holistic guide: From optimization to production monitoring
Getting Started with NemoClaw on Windows (WSL2)
A practical guide to NVIDIA's sandboxed AI coding agent--what it does, why it matters, and how to work around its current limitations.
I asked NotebookLM to Make a Movie from my Journal throughout 2002
During this time I was serving as a military intelligence contractor.
Your Model Doesn't Need to Re-Read the Document
Introducing Stateful Neural Databases
The Recursive Developer
How to build systems that improve themselves, and what happens to you when they do.
Your Agent Has Amnesia
Every agentic memory system is a vector database pretending to be a brain.
How to Actually Code With Agents
The velocity trap, the practices that survive it, and why the job changed more than most developers want to admit.
A $1.5 Million Company Just Did What Used to Require the CIA
The West built the commercial satellite industry. A Chinese startup just weaponized it.
Agentic Development Workflows
An AI Product Engineer's Field Guide, Part 1
Inside Maven, Palantir's Military Brain Built on Claude
How an AI safety company's technology ended up selecting bombing targets in Iran -- including the strike that killed 150 schoolgirls -- and the standoff that followed.
Structure-Aware Tokenization for JSON
The Next Stage in Scaling AI is to Stop the Waste
Read the Contract, Not the Press Release: What OpenAI's Pentagon Deal Actually Says
A 5-minute read for people who need to understand what just happened.
From Theoretical Exploit to Counterterrorism Tool: A Retrospective on Early Mobile Vulnerabilities
Originally written 2001. Revised and annotated February 2026.
CoDA-GQA-L: How We Compressed the KV Cache 9.5x on Mistral-7B With Only 23.5% Perplexity Overhead
A technical deep-dive into bounded-memory differential attention with value-routed landmark banks
From "We Need AI" to "We Ship AI"
Notes From the Trenches
AI Product Engineering: Why Surface Level-Safety Won't Scale
The biggest problem in AI safety right now is simple to state: we can control what models output, but we have no idea why they output it.
The Map Is Not the Territory
Why Sparse Autoencoders Might Be Leading Us Astray
Medium → all posts
- The Agentic Coding Shift 5 counter-intuitive truths about building AI systems
- The REKKI Case Study Becoming an AI-first organization
- Llama 4 Running Locally Local deployment in under an hour
Hugging Face → profile
- Slipstream for Agent Communication Technical deep-dive on semantic quantization
- Model Organism for Supply-Chain Co-option Forensic LotL case study in agentic runtimes
The Checkpoint Newsletter
Weekly roundup of developments that matter if you build, deploy, or think critically about AI systems.
- Aug 28, 2026 — The Harness Has Always Been the Product
- Aug 21, 2026 — The file dropped. The constraint sat around it.
- Video Edition — July 10, 2026
- July 10, 2026 — Six items for people building, deploying, or thinking seriously about AI systems. No hype. No filler. Just the signal.
- June 30, 2026 — The Checkpoint: Jun 30, 2026
- June 19, 2026 — Seven developments from the past seven days that matter if you build, deploy, or think critically about AI systems.
- Apr 19, 2026 — Six developments from the past seven days that matter if you build, deploy, or think critically about AI systems, with impact analysis from an AI product engineer with 20 years in the industry.
- Mar 30, 2026 — Six developments from the past seven days that matter if you build, deploy, or think critically about AI systems. No hype. No filler. Just the signal.
- Mar 21, 2026 — The top developments from the past seven days that matter if you build, deploy, or think critically about AI systems.
- March 13th, 2026 — New Models, New Research, No Hype, All Signal
- March 5, 2026 — Data and compute are the new fossil fuels.
Something to play
Games
A multiplayer word race, a cozy chicken ranch, and an Oregon Trail-inspired trip around EPCOT.
Roblox 1-4 players
Chicken Tenders
Build a ranch. Raise a flock.
Start with Pearl, hatch colorful chickens, sell eggs, and fill market orders. Turn the earnings into land, a farmhouse, and a ranch of your own.
Play on Roblox
Browser game Single player
The Lagoon Trail
Eating around the world
An Oregon Trail-inspired eating trip around EPCOT. Pick your provisions, manage the family budget, and make it around the lagoon one stop at a time.
Play in your browser
Glossary
Safety & Oversight
- HDCS
- — Heterogeneous Divergence-Convergence Swarm. Ensemble of diverse AI models that cross-check each other.
- CMED
- — Cross-Model Epistemic Divergence. Test suite for revealing AI verification blind spots.
- EAP
- — Evolutionary Adversarial Pipeline. Automated red-teaming that evolves prompts to find safety blind spots.
- LotL
- — Living-off-the-Land. Repurposing legitimate tools for unintended goals.
Architectures
- MRA
- — Manifold Resonance Architecture. Detects epistemic stress before generating answers.
- CPR
- — Collaborative Partner Reasoning. Separates exploratory reasoning from final answers.
- C2
- — Continuity Core. Layered memory giving stateless AI persistent context.
- UCR
- — Universal Concept Reference. Compact semantic anchors for 82% fewer tokens.
- SABER
- — Slip-Anchors, Experience Streams, and Re-entry. Cognitive architecture with learnable error-correction codebooks, per-token state flow, and resonant FFN layers.
- CoDA
- — Constrained Orthogonal Differential Attention. Sharpens attention by subtracting a gated inhibitory stream via learnable rotation.