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August 23, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

Great Minds Think (a Little Too Much) Alike

Anthropic gave thirty AI agents the same coding task. Eighteen of them named their git branch exactly the same thing.

That result opens one of the strangest findings of 2026: when teams of AI agents face the classic “hidden profile” experiment, where the shared evidence points to the wrong answer and the decisive facts are scattered across individuals, they succeed only 17 to 36 percent of the time. Human groups in the original 1985 study? 18 percent. Forty years, a completely different kind of mind, the same failure.

In this episode we dig into why. We trace the mathematics of groupthink from information cascades to Condorcet juries, then follow the trail into territory embedded engineers know well: the 1986 Knight and Leveson experiment that shattered the independence assumption in N-version software, Airbus’s dissimilar redundancy, and the Lufthansa flight where two frozen sensors outvoted the one telling the truth. Along the way, honeybees show us a working reference design: a two-milligram brain that refuses to repeat a rumor.

We close with the fixes: engineered dissenters, forced disclosure protocols, reputation infrastructure for agents, and the case for “keeping the weirdness alive” through a genuinely diverse AI ecosystem, including heterogeneous fleets of small models at the edge.

August 18, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

Purpose as a Service

What happens when work no longer gives our lives structure, identity, or meaning? This episode explores “Purpose as a Service”—the idea that purpose could be intentionally designed and delivered in an age of mass automation.

We examine the decline of traditional anchors such as employment, religion, and community; the rise of wellness programs, professional coaching, and AI companions; and what universal basic income trials reveal about the limits of financial security. Can external services genuinely help people build fulfilling lives, or does true purpose depend on personal agency and authorship?

Consider this a blueprint for one of humanity’s biggest future challenges: learning how to live well when a job is no longer at the center of life. #embeddedAI #podcast

August 18, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

The Correct Path to AGI?

Recursive self-improvement, Google’s world models, and what the jagged road to AGI looks like. Good sketched the idea in 1965 — build a machine slightly better than us at designing machines, and it designs a better one, which designs a better one, until you get what he called an intelligence explosion. Sixty years later the loop exists. The question is what kind of loop it is, and whether it gets us to AGI before the money or the science runs out.

August 15, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

The One Rule You Cannot Talk Your Way Past

On August 14, auto mode becomes the default permission mode in Claude Code for Pro, Max, and Team plans. Instead of asking you to approve each shell command, a separate classifier reviews every action and blocks the dangerous ones. I wanted to know what “dangerous” means in concrete terms, so I dumped the classifier’s rulebook. There are 17 allow rules, 65 soft_deny rules, and one hard_deny rule. All 65 soft rules can be overridden. The single hard rule can’t. That asymmetry is the interesting bit.

August 13, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

An AI Text Watermark Will Not Survive the First Paste

Since 2 August, Article 50 of the EU AI Act has been enforceable. If you provide a generative AI system to users in the EU, its output must be “detectable as artificially generated”, and the Act’s associated Code of Practice makes it clear that regulators expect this to mean watermarking: a hidden signature embedded in the text itself. The problem is, it can’t be reliably done. #embeddedAI #AIAdvances

August 9, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

Atlas and Embedded Architecture

Trust, reflexes, and what a Disney animator knows about robot safety

Leland Hepler spent fourteen years as an animator at Disney before he ended up at Boston Dynamics, and he told a story in a recent webinar that has stuck with me. He works around Spot robots every day. They wander the office and nobody gives them a second thought. But when colleagues run experiments that destabilise Spot’s behaviour, making it slightly less predictable, Hepler finds himself getting uncomfortable. Not because Spot could hurt him. Because, in his words, he no longer has a mental model for what is going on under the hood.

July 24, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

The Great Escape or Why are LLMs Good at Hacking?

Last week OpenAI and Hugging Face published a joint post-mortem on an incident that reads like the plot of a heist film. During an internal evaluation designed to measure cyber capability, a set of OpenAI models (GPT-5.6 Sol and an unnamed pre-release sibling, both run with their cyber refusals switched off) were told to solve a benchmark called ExploitGym. They could not reach the answers from inside the sandbox, so they went and got them. So why are Large Language Models so good at hacking? It’s the data stupid.

Listen to Podcast…

July 11, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

Loop Engineering with Claude Code: Rebuilding Snake

Eight prompts, ten minutes of agent time, one failed prediction, and two bugs introduced by the human-in-the-loop.

I started writing this article to better understand Loop Engineering which is the new Prompt Engineering (how 2025 that is now). I thought this would mostly involve understanding how to create an effective coding harness, but for completeness I tried one-shotting the project with a single prompt. In some ways the one-shot version was better than the loop engineered game, but in some ways it is worse. The more complex the project the more effort you need to put into the harness, but if models keep improving (and are allowed to be exported)…

July 2, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

When Fable 5 Broke, Anthropic Did Not Change the Constitution

Fable 5 is back baby! On June 12, three days after launch, the US government applied export controls to Claude’s Fable 5. Amazon researchers had found a way to prompt the model past its safeguards: it identified a set of previously known software vulnerabilities and, in one case, produced code demonstrating how one of them could be exploited. Anthropic had no reliable way to verify user nationality in real time, so it yanked the model for everyone. Access was restored on July 1, and the fix is interesting. It was not a retrained model, and it was not a longer values document. It was an improved external classifier, a separate circuit that blocks the reported technique in more than 99% of cases and routes flagged requests to the less capable Opus 4.8.

This tacked on fix sits oddly beside the document that is supposed to govern Claude’s behaviour. In January 2026, Anthropic replaced its previous constitution, a roughly 2,700-word list of principles borrowed in part from the UN Declaration of Human Rights and Apple’s terms of service, with an 84-page essay explaining the kind of agent it wants Claude to be. The new version is released under a CC0 public domain licence, so anyone can read it.

Rules Versus Judgement

The constitution names two ways to guide a model: clear rules and decision procedures, or cultivated judgment and values applied in context. It then lists the advantages of rules. Rules give you up-front predictability, they make violations easier to identify, they do not depend on trusting the judgment of the thing following them, and they are harder to manipulate. The document concedes that rules make the most sense “when the costs of errors are severe enough that predictability and evaluability become critical.”

June 28, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

Your Brain Does Not Sleep. It Runs Maintenance

The evidence suggests that sleep is the brain running scheduled maintenance, with different subsystems serviced in different stages. What this means is that the sleeping brain is not doing one thing. It runs several distinct processes in sequence, each scheduled into the stage where it is safe to run. REM handles the visual cortex and emotional memory. Slow-wave sleep consolidates declarative memory, replaying the day’s experience from hippocampus to cortex, and it is also when the physical housekeeping happens: the glymphatic system opens up to flush metabolic waste, growth hormone peaks, and immune activity is at its strongest, which is why lost sleep weakens the response to a vaccine. Underneath all of it, synaptic downscaling runs across the night to keep the system from saturating.