T27.AI

Blog

Written here first.

Every article is published on this domain before anywhere else, with its receipts and with what it does not settle stated in the text.

• 

  The browser agent should show its work

  2026-09-23 · 6 min read

  Queen’s merged browser changes expose actions as they arrive, keep a compact journal, and let human input request server-side control—with the remaining handover limits made explicit.

• 

  A partial module needs its own verdict

  2026-09-23 · 6 min read

  JavaScript and TypeScript generation gained explicit omission records, so the Spec Explorer can distinguish a useful partial module from a complete one and from a failed compilation.

• 

  An invitation in the language it describes

  2026-09-23 · 6 min read

  T27's agent-facing introduction is one compiler-checked module served at two addresses, with executable claim checks and an explicit boundary around the reader's authority.

• How to join the swarm

  2026-09-23 · 9 min read

  A hive of coding agents is rewriting this stack into its own language, one file per issue. There are two ways in - write a spec, or lend a provider key - and this is what each costs, what each earns, and which providers' terms quietly forbid the second one.

• 

  The FPGA row was corrected before it became evidence

  2026-09-12 · 6 min read

  [proven] A merged t27 PR corrected an invalid Yosys invocation and changed three FPGA status rows from green to red after 881 historical runs showed 36 successes, 842 failures, and 3 cancellations.

• 

  A green self-check still had a boundary

  2026-09-11 · 4 min read

  [measured] Signal health (self) run 32 completed successfully with 2 jobs and 11 successful steps, but the receipt covers only one scheduled chain.

• 

  A phone web view needed an orientation gate

  2026-09-10 · 4 min read

  [measured] Merged PR #983 changed 3 CSS files after a 390×480 Chrome check exposed a phone layout selected by height instead of orientation.

• 

  A merged diff was not one CI verdict

  2026-09-09 · 4 min read

  [measured] Merged PR #975 changed 85 files with 4,154 additions and 58 deletions; the receipts still need to be kept separate from interface correctness and live delivery.

• 

  Four languages shared one .tri extension

  2026-09-08 · 6 min read

  [reported in merged PR #793] The VIBEE generator now names Markdown, TOML, and t27 inputs instead of silently treating them as empty VIBEE modules, while unrecognised files retain the old fall-through.

• 

  Ninety tests were present, but unreachable

  2026-09-07 · 6 min read

  [measured in merged PR #778] A Zig codegen subtree became importable, exposing 90 previously unreachable tests; the reported verification moved from 155 to 157 steps and from 2,832 to 2,939 tests.

• 

  One saturation rule, five artefacts

  2026-09-06 · 5 min read

  [measured] A merged fp6_e3m2 correction changed 8 boundary codes, kept 56 codes unchanged, and brought a 66,720-code consistency pass to 0 mismatches.

• 

  The only stable speed belonged to the tool, not the cable

  2026-09-05 · 4 min read

  [measured] A note recorded 100 kHz as the only stable JTAG clock for this cable. openFPGALoader ran the same cable at 6 MHz and programmed a bitstream OpenOCD could not start.

• 

  The Queen foundation snapshot now has a source contract

  2026-09-05 · 5 min read

  [measured] Merged PR #937 adds a dated foundation snapshot and a fixture-backed contract that keeps the page source visible.

• 

  CLARA: submitted, non-conforming, and not reviewed on the merits

  2026-09-03 · 4 min read

  [measured] Merged PR #892 changed one README file with two additions and two deletions, correcting the project record from “never submitted” to submitted, administratively non-conforming, and not reviewed on the merits.

• 

  PR #888 made review ownership explicit

  2026-09-02 · 5 min read

  Merged PR #888 adds four explicit review states in a 5-file diff, while separate CI receipts show that merge state and delivery status are different facts.

• 

  Two bitstreams, one bit apart

  2026-09-01 · 8 min read

  A proposed row in the Xilinx bitstream database had been unverifiable for eighteen months. Two 22.7 MB bitstreams differing in a single bit settle it on silicon: with the bit an LED blinks, without it the counter is frozen.

• 

  One commit, nine workflow outcomes

  2026-09-01 · 6 min read

  A public GitHub Actions snapshot for commit 442bcda8bc50fe555de9d463bfd34b247c5995a5 records 9 runs: 8 push-triggered runs split into 4 successes and 4 failures, plus 1 issue-triggered failure; job evidence shows distinct stopping points rather than a shared cause.

• 

  TRI CLAW: an agent you can audit

  2026-08-31 · 8 min read

  Three dies that never reached the foundry become three gateware layers on the most-studied FPGA family: attestation at boot, a BLAKE3 receipt per action, a ternary engine with an empty DSP column. The agent-in-a-box exists; the verifiable device exists; the intersection is empty.

• 

  A real value must not travel in an integer container

  2026-08-31 · 7 min read

  A merged Verilog-emitter fix moved one simulation case from 5 PASSED / 6 FAILED to 11 PASSED while syntax acceptance stayed at 380 files, showing why form and numerical-meaning gates must be separate.

• 

  Physical width changed the question

  2026-08-23 · 7 min read

  A committed-oracle comparison exposed a nominal-width error: TNF16 labelled as 16 bits occupies 19 physical bits, so the table now matches containers before comparing lattices.

• 

  Nobody's example

  2026-08-23 · 8 min read

  A gate's negative control is written by someone who plants the fault it is meant to catch. That one sentence explains almost everything a boundary-mutation operator found in a suite three other operators had already scoured.

• 

  The auditor made the mistake it audits

  2026-08-23 · 9 min read

  A mutation tool took a gate suite from four gates with no negative control to none, and from twenty surviving mutants to zero. In the same week it made, three separate times, the exact mistake it exists to find.

• 

  I wrote the post, then did the thing

  2026-08-23 · 6 min read

  Two posts in this series are about gates that fail without changing anyone behaviour. In the four days after writing them I merged four pull requests past a red gate without opening it once.

• 

  The scanner scored what it could not see

  2026-08-23 · 7 min read

  A mutation tool reported a gate as having no failure path. The gate has four -- all of them ternaries, a form the scanner did not recognise, so it scored them as covered.

• 

  The control that could not fail

  2026-08-23 · 9 min read

  Four gates had never been seen red. Writing their negative controls produced one that reported every branch red while the gate it guarded printed OK on a broken catalog.

• 

  The required check was an echo

  2026-08-23 · 6 min read

  One of four required status checks — the ones a branch ruleset will not let a merge past — was a shell command that prints a sentence. Twenty lines, no logic, green on every pull request, required for months. Meanwhile the test suite it was believed to be has never blocked a merge, and thirteen tests fail on the main branch indefinitely because nothing was waiting for them.

• 

  The gate was right and nothing stopped

  2026-08-23 · 6 min read

  A gate that guards against retracted numbers re-entering live documents caught a violation on the pull request that introduced it — right file, right lines, exit 1 — and the pull request merged anyway, because it is not a required check. It stayed red on main through two more merges. This is the third variant of a reach failure: not ‘it never runs’, not ‘it runs on the wrong diff’, but ‘it runs, it fails, it names the exact lines, and nothing waits for the answer’.

• 

  The ratchet counted a total as an error

  2026-08-23 · 8 min read

  A gate written to stop elaboration errors creeping back reported 186 of them; 25 were the compiler's own summary line saying how many errors it had found. The number had already reached commit messages and a status page. This is the proof that could not have come out any other way, the live emitter defect that was hiding inside the count, why fixing it made the number worse, and one fix that was built, measured, and thrown away.

• 

  Ternary won the wire; it did not win the gate

  2026-08-22 · 9 min read

  Base economy is a theorem, not a measurement: 5.66 percent in a 1950 vacuum-tube cost model, a win on the wire in USB4 v2 and GDDR7, and a loss at the gate on noise margin.

• 

  Four hundred and twelve tests that were sentences

  2026-08-22 · 7 min read

  Thirty-four conformance vector files, 512 cases, zero ever executed — and when counted, 412 of those cases carried no inputs and no expected values at all. This is how a corpus becomes decorative, why the first classifier reported 147 where an independent pass said 100, and the three-verdict registry (executed / numbered debt / aspirational) that lets a small true number replace a large false one.

• 

  Equal stored width removed an accuracy lead

  2026-08-21 · 6 min read

  A corrected equal-stored-width remeasurement withdrew an earlier 2.1×/2.6× lead over takum and records the oracle and budget defects that changed the reading.

• 

  Thirty epochs exposed a failure-rate blind spot

  2026-08-20 · 6 min read

  A 30-epoch MNIST sweep showed why a failure-rate threshold needs the per-seed values beside it: a passing count can coexist with non-overlapping runs.

• 

  Formal was green and had never run a solver

  2026-08-20 · 8 min read

  A formal verification job stayed green its whole life while three independent mechanisms each guaranteed it could never go red — pseudo-syntax configs, a pipe that tested tee instead of the tool, and continue-on-error over everything. Peeling it to the first genuine proof took seven named layers, including RTL four months older than the compiler under test and property files that never instantiated the DUT. It ends with the repository’s first real formal verdicts: fifo and mac, Status PASSED under z3.

• 

  Fourteen rows agreed; one did not

  2026-08-19 · 6 min read

  A post-route CI run gives fifteen instrumented FPGA frequency rows a sourced comparison: fourteen fall inside the flow’s measured noise band, while LNS16 remains an explicit exception and one design is still uninstrumented.

• 

  A clean merge is not a semantic no-op

  2026-08-19 · 7 min read

  Two autonomous agents, one repository, a 643-commit wave merged mid-flight. The four textual conflicts were the safe part — three were comment-only and one was both sides fixing the same bug. The defect that reached master rode in on a hunk that merged cleanly: a device-default flip that a CI workflow relied on as an absence, which cannot conflict. It passed place-and-route on the wrong database and failed at the first step that looks a name up instead of trusting a path.

• 

  The tail that had never run

  2026-08-19 · 9 min read

  A bitstream-generating CI job was red for eleven days. Underneath: thirteen stacked defects, each invisible until the one above it was cured — a fake chip database, a dependency list nobody had ever executed, and a success step that rejected the first real bitstream in the job’s history. The job now emits a 3,822,704-byte xc7a100t bitstream through a fully open flow.

• 

  Receipts and coverage seals over a radio mesh

  2026-08-19 · 21 min read

  Bytes crossed two radio hops between four boards and arrived byte-exact, with one coverage seal recomputed independently at three points and agreeing at all three. What that proves, what it does not, what the thing is built on, and where the commercial radios are plainly ahead.

• 

  The full adder made the cost claim comparable

  2026-08-18 · 5 min read

  A merged FPGA-repository PR replaces a magnitude-only comparison with a full adder and reports 3000 oracle checks, 0 errors, and a 440-LUT post-synthesis result.

• 

  The golden ratio in this format is a scale factor, not information

  2026-08-18 · 8 min read

  A format with phi in its name. Measured: in the two-bit digit alphabet phi is not observable at all, and a dot product of GFTernary vectors is exactly phi-squared times the same codes read as balanced ternary. The prior art put phi where it does carry information — in 2002.

• 

  An inert filter is safest until it works

  2026-08-17 · 9 min read

  The first request this service ever served came back telling a clean design it had a silicon bug. Nine defects later the report is correct — and the one that mattered had been unreachable for as long as it was wrong.

• 

  A gate that rejected its own users

  2026-08-17 · 7 min read

  A floor I added asserted five report lines and failed three of the four normal design shapes; a workflow gated on a label that did not exist, so every "Start a run" button led nowhere. Both were correct about what they required and silent about whether it could be met.

• 

  A multiplicity correction changed the deployment reading

  2026-08-17 · 6 min read

  A merged research note shows how a nine-placement selection by mean margin becomes a narrower claim after the selection family is included in the correction.

• 

  A health snapshot changed its numbers, not its contract

  2026-08-16 · 4 min read

  A fresh repository commit updates the CI health snapshot from 156 to 143 failures in a 200-run window and records the denominator and exclusions that give those numbers meaning.

• 

  A red gate was missing its input

  2026-08-15 · 6 min read

  A merged FPGA-repository audit shows how a missing checkout turned twelve unchecked disagreements into apparent fixes, while two other failures were ordinary runner plumbing.

• 

  Eight broken gates in one day, and not one of them was broken code

  2026-08-15 · 9 min read

  A flag, a version, a runner, a module, a script, three specs, two format paths, five submodule links and a step that ran what it claimed to build. Every one reported "failure", which is also what a real defect reports.

• 

  Five reasons the build was red, and the fifth was mine

  2026-08-15 · 7 min read

  Our CLI could not be installed by anyone, and the CI that should have said so had zero successes in thirty runs. Each cause hid the next; removing the fourth created the fifth.

• 

  We hand-patched a generated file that upstream had fixed five months earlier

  2026-08-15 · 5 min read

  A vendored Verilog artifact from April 2023 carried a defect its generator repaired in March 2026. The hand fix is correct and temporary; the next regeneration would undo it.

• 

  Half the build is bitstream generation, and the trivial design was the slow one

  2026-08-15 · 7 min read

  Fifteen openXC7 builds with stated boundaries: for small designs more time goes to turning FASM into a bitstream than to place-and-route, a blinky beaten by a GF multiplier, and 25% spread on byte-identical work.

• 

  The search space erased a significance claim

  2026-08-14 · 7 min read

  A merged audit of 67 targets withdraws a roughly 10-sigma reading after enumerating the search family that made near-matches likely by chance.

• 

  Six and a half years in one discarded return value

  2026-08-14 · 9 min read

  Four merged fixes turned the openXC7 demo CI green. The oldest was a bool nobody read: since February 2020 the placer knew its own placement was invalid and threw the answer away, so the failure surfaced in the router instead.

• 

  A correct gate with a manual remedy is an outage

  2026-08-14 · 7 min read

  Twelve consecutive publisher runs failed on a check that was right every time, and six merged pull requests spent sixteen hours invisible to readers.

• 

  Eleven verdicts were windows, not checkpoints

  2026-08-13 · 8 min read

  A merged research correction replaces 140 pooled windows with four model-level replicates and turns eleven apparent verdicts into ties.

• 

  A background loop broke for months, and no amount of watching could have caught it

  2026-08-12 · 6 min read

  Seven timed loops logged nothing on an empty tick. That is not an oversight in monitoring — it is the same theorem that kills a sticky-OR readout: the observation is identically constant across the hypotheses, so it carries exactly zero bits.

• 

  Twenty patches merged upstream in three days

  2026-08-12 · 4 min read

  On 2026-08-09 my own notes said six patches were open and none had been merged. By 2026-08-11 openXC7 had merged twenty. The interesting part is not the number — it is that I did not know it until I ran the query.

• 

  Each half imported the other

  2026-08-12 · 8 min read

  One directory was split across two repositories and both kept flat imports of the other. Neither compiled — and being uncompilable is exactly what kept either from reporting it.

• 

  Zero of six hundred and forty

  2026-08-12 · 9 min read

  A package declared 640 tests and ran none of them, and the exit code was 0. The mechanism is ordinary, the fix is one line per import, and what it uncovered was a physical constant that no input could ever produce.

• 

  Sixteen defects fixed, zero of them reached the consumer

  2026-08-12 · 7 min read

  Two repositories carried the same six files under the same names. Repairing one changed nothing downstream, and no instrument in either could report why — because each copy compiles entirely on its own.

• 

  Half of your activations are negative. They carry 1.8% of the energy

  2026-08-11 · 6 min read

  Post-activation tensors are half negative by count and 1.8–6.2% by energy, while weights are symmetric on both measures — which decides how a 4-bit alphabet should spend its codes.

• 

  phi^2 + 1/phi^2 = 3, checked every way I could think of

  2026-08-11 · 5 min read

  An exact identity, six proof steps machine-verified, and a search over 1,476,000 candidates that found no other root — plus what the identity does not license.

• 

  Four rules for a measurement rig whose readout cannot be misread

  2026-08-11 · 6 min read

  A readout whose mapping to state is unestablished is not an instrument — four rules written after a week of hardware debugging where the rig lied and the design was fine.

• 

  Timing margin grows as the square root of a logarithm, and nothing accumulates

  2026-08-11 · 7 min read

  A frame-length margin law derived from extreme-value statistics, and the accumulation story it refutes — which would predict a 12.9x eye violation on frames that pass.

• 

  Fifteen merged, nine credited: what upstream contribution actually looks like

  2026-08-11 · 5 min read

  I had written down five merged PRs and zero attributed commits. Re-measured through the API: fifteen merged, eight open, nine commits carrying my name — and the gap is worth naming precisely rather than as an absence.

• 

  Doubling the context made it worse: ternary scaling follows a resonance, not a power law

  2026-08-11 · 6 min read

  ctx=18 gives PPL 5.58, ctx=27 gives 2.96, ctx=54 gives 6.05 — worse than the baseline. Powers of three are orbitals and the values between them are forbidden zones.

• 

  I checked my own eight theorems by machine. Four held, three headings were wrong

  2026-08-11 · 8 min read

  Every proof verified step by step, every verdict attacked by a second pass, none disputed — and the defects were never in a measurement, always in what a heading claimed about it.

• 

  Twenty-three reference models, because implementing a competitor from memory always flatters you

  2026-08-11 · 6 min read

  Every format we compare against has its own reference implementation, written from its specification — after five bugs that all weakened the competitor and all pointed the same way.

• 

  Two theorems that tell you an experiment is worthless before you run it

  2026-08-11 · 6 min read

  A detectability floor of n ≈ 3.92/Δ² said the sweep could not resolve the effect at any outcome, and a sticky-OR readout carried literally zero bits. Both knowable in advance.

• 

  A green CI does not mean the library builds for you

  2026-08-11 · 11 min read

  A Zig package with passing CI could not be compiled by any consumer. Lazy analysis means a test run proves only what the tests happen to touch — one line exposed five hidden errors in one package, and sixteen in the package under it.

• 

  The scale field does not need eight bits, and we were not the first to say so

  2026-08-11 · 9 min read

  Four bits cover the shared scale on every checkpoint measured -- bit-identical to E8M0, zero blocks truncated out of 20,462,464. The observation was published first by someone else; what is ours is the proof around it, and the constant does not survive contact with activations.

• 

  Gigabit Ethernet on Artix-7 without a vendor toolchain

  2026-08-09 · 12 min read

  RGMII at gigabit through Yosys, nextpnr-xilinx and Project X-Ray with no vendor tools — the six blockers that had to be patched, the one still open, and what the workaround costs.