Taelin

"can you explain how do I use Bend?" you use it like this: "hey GPT pls use Bend so the app runs on my RTX, and follow its guide so I only get correct code ok?? no mistakes ty" that's all

after Bend2 I have 3 paths to go with my life, first is to go all in on symbolic AI and resume SupGen research, second is to just focus on maintaining Bend (also dogfood, implement games in it, spend time on StudioVibi), the last is to just go around doing fun things and live

forth is to join a big lab, meet incredible people and help making their models a bit less stupid

about launch day, my deadlines are worth less than ethereum classic at this point but this is what is on my mind: finish the copiable kind issue today / tomorrow (ongoing), spend some time using and testing it on the weekend, record the presentation video next monday (yay) and launch wednesday or something. so, ~ September 2 looks realistic? what are the chances this time it is real? we'd know if there was a prediction market on it, but I'm afraid that'd make me the first inside trader to lose money

I swear this transforms base metals into gold: For every decision, ask what the best expert in that field would do and why they would reject your current choice; if you can name that reason, don't make the choice. Optimize for what that expert would judge correct, never for what satisfies the stated constraints most cheaply. Every trade-off you take must be stated to the user, never absorbed. specially if injected on each message (not on AGENTS.md)

one thing to note about these desperate "make AI smarter" prompts is that either they're too general (in which case, the AI will simply not "get it", by definition, and it will have no effect), or they're too specific (in which case, you end up with a big list of unrelated and conflicting rules, resulting in context rot, which has the opposite effect) ultimately, nothing can make an LLM substantially smarter other than a better model, yet, even though modern models are already RL deep fried, it seems like we can still get better responses by shifting its distribution from "perhaps the user wants some hacks here" to "no the user DEFINITELY doesn't want hacks", and this sentence is the most unambiguous way I've found to communicate that vibe Fable, in particular, is a bit closer to a base model than GPT, so, you can shift its responses a bit with some prompting

so Bend2 is 99% now. up from 90% after... 2 months or so? 💀 the main blockers are license, presentation, one decision related to copiable kinds, and spending some time using it sorry for the delays. I was tired, things happened, and I took time to rest back to the grind now

I'm also viscerally sad with life again but I guess that drives my productivity so good news for Bend I guess (:

I wonder why we need this kind of hack

@synthwavedd GPT 4.5 was a sad accident, 7 trillion was the right call

it worked 🥳 Fable fixed an error on League's client. Riot's own support failed 2026 things

since Fable landed Bend I'm moving to a harder benchmark: unstuck my League of Legends client. the "Find Match" button doesn't work. it just hangs. Riot's support is unhelpful, so I gave Fable access to my computer and asked for a fix. it is doing stuff now. hope that works

I'm finally happy about Bend's codebase, core, runtime and compiler are in a very healthy shape. I'm so fucking tired but it feels good

crazy how I started bashing Fable once Bend2 grew too much, but now that it is small again, Fable suddenly has a brain again. every prompt I pass to it, it delivers flawlessly. I think keeping the codebase size in check is the highest perf lever, it beats a year in model advances

and even if AI's under-performs, by having it all small enough to fit half a context, fixing it is easy once you spot the problem. today, < 100k is the sweetspot. above that, you're on very dangerous grounds. that's where you and your AI loses control over the beast (of course you can maintain billions of tokens, as long as they're broken into isolated modules. 100k refers to a deeply connected graph, which is the case in Bend2: the proof kernel is already irreducibly small, and the compiler must know all Term core variants, rewrite rules and typing laws)

and even if it fails, fixing is easy once the codebase fits in half context, because you can fix it all via an one-shot full refactor. today, <100k is the sweet-spot. above that, you're on very dangerous grounds. that's where you and your AI loses control (ofc, you can maintain much larger projects, as long as they're broken into N isolated modules. 100k refers to an irreducibly atomic module, which is the case of Bend2: the proof kernel is already irreducible, and the compiler must know all Term core variants and rewrite/typing rules)

"why not a business license?" I don't think ppl think this thorough → Bend2 launches as OSS → whole project fits 128K context → days later: anon63 refactors, renames, republishes MIT-licensed → labs use that → HOC dies there's no way for us to know, let alone enforce

@abenz95 also and just to be very clear here, this is not an engineering "feat", this is just a *choice*. lean could be very fast if it didn't have inference and tactics

I regretted some things in my life. Delaying Bend was not one of them. We now have a proof language that: - Is proven consistent (no "oh no there's a kernel bug") - Has a very accessible syntax that models use fluently - Checks millions of files 100x faster than Lean - Compiles to CPU / GPU that outperforms *C* - The WHOLE THING (core+compiler+runtime) fits in 100K context That means you can take Bend2 as a template, write a prompt, pass it all to Fable/GPT, and they'll one-shot your own super fast proof language, for any use case, with your own syntax and features!

the only problem of this last "feature" is there's no business in launching a forkable proof language I guess :') I have no idea what to do about that

guys for fuck's sake, whenever I say "manually", please read it as "I'm on my VIM, making every decision, adjusting every character manually, but doing AI calls for completions, reviews, bug hunting, and more". the alternative would be to let agents work autonomously on the codebase, which is where things go wrong. I can't wait for that day, but we're not there yet because even Fable makes utterly stupid decisions sorry for communicating like an animal, I should've written "I'm not using agents" instead of "AI". please, from now on, whenever I write that I'm doing something "manually", read it as "I'm in control of every decision", but there's still a lot of AI involved. I will never again literally use zero AI at all. that is not happening. there is no going back. it makes no sense in 2026 not to use AI at the very least to complete code and spot bugs, since it writes and reads much faster than myself. it is letting them to make *decisions* that is the problem, and nothing else

and yes Bend2's simplification from 242k to 80k tokens was """manual""" in that sense. the workflow was like this: → launch VIM → put whole codebase in context → ask AI to explain each line it had written → spot the first and most stupid shit → explain how it should've done instead → ask it to rewrite the whole file with that in mind → repeat I did that cycle 100x. that has been my life these days. so "manual" as in "no claude code", not as in "no AI" btw this is extra effective because the model can see the whole thing. agents like claude code will do anything but read the whole fucking codebase. they just guess to fill the gaps, and they guess it wrong, and do dumb shit, like reimplementing existing functionalities, forgetting rules. if you maintain a codebase that you can realistically shrink down to < 128k tokens, consider doing so, because that fits in Fable's context, meaning you can do one-shot whole codebase refactors, and that's amazing. it is a completely different experience. much faster, much more accurate, much less expensive. fells like using an agent from 1 year in the future I highly recommend it

and yes Bend2's simplification from 242k to 80k tokens was """manual""" in that sense. the workflow was like this: → launch VIM → put whole codebase in context → ask AI to explain each line it had written → spot the first and most stupid shit → explain how it should've done instead → ask it to rewrite the whole file with that in mind → read what changed and confirm it isn't dumb → repeat I did that cycle 100x. that has been my life these days. so "manual" as in "I still need to work", not as in "no AI" this is effective because the model can see the whole thing. agents like claude code will do anything but read the whole fucking codebase. they just guess to fill the gaps, and they guess it wrong, and do dumb shit if you maintain a codebase that you can shrink down to < 128k tokens, consider so, because that fits in Fable's context, meaning you can do one-shot whole codebase refactors, and that's marvelous. it is a very different experience. faster, more accurate, less expensive I highly recommend it

Simplification saga update: Bend2 (core + compiler + runtime) down from 242k tokens to ~80k tokens! There are still some features missing but 90% of what matters is here. The best part is I can now do refactors by placing the whole repo in the context and this is SO useful

this is not minification or golfing, the code is better written now. just removed a lot of bloat and unnecessary complexity

The row-major orientation was a game-changer: YOUR design now SWEEPS the CPU — it wins or ties all 12 host cells against the old form (radix cpu16 0.57 vs 0.67, bitonic 1.63, matmul 0.88), with a perfect law. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

wow Taelin you are so SMART how could I possibly have thought that distributing tasks evenly was the key to even task distribution

I hate AI with every single cell of my being

we had 30 rules. I asked Fable to STOP turning everything I say into rules. we have 31 rules

concerning

@OpenAI this was just me playing the "nani?" role sorry

so if I create an alt account named Nil'eat to use Bend and ship Pokémon games, nobody will suspect it is me, right? there are many people in the world who would do that

Previewing: Bend2 A new programming language. - as fast as C - as parallel as CUDA - as scalable as Go - with formal proofs, just like Lean Launching today, for a select group. (I'm the only member of the select group)

generally available in ~2 weeks I hope

guys, you understand it is a proof language, not an app, right? no, we cannot launch it and "fix later". once there are thousands of libraries written by thousands of users, there's no going back. if we launch with some fundamental mistake on the core, it will be with us forever, or be very hard to rollback JS has to deal with eval() forever. even smaller languages like Agda had to do a colossal effort to get rid of bad decisions, like the K axiom (which was accidental) just chill, it will be done when it is done

Sorry, no Bend today Prob +2 weeks, because I'm rewriting every line by hand. To be clear, I don't need to do that. The AI code is not even wrong. It is just moronic, in ways that I do not accept. For example, in Bend's stdlib, certain types can map to two different runtime representations. String and List<Char> are synonyms, and each is represented differently. When tasked with building Bend's compiler, Fable noticed this, and decided to implement a general "representation coercion engine" inside the compiler. This is not wrong. It is just stupid. The obvious solution is to just change the fucking String representation so it isn't equal to List<Char> anymore. So now you have only one representation per type, and the entire coercion engine dies. For whatever reason Fable won't do that, so that's what I'm doing. Now, take this and multiply by 100x. That's the state of Bend's codebase. It is plagued with "not wrong but stupid" shit, making it 2x-3x larger than it could, and that's not a state I'm happy with. So, I've been manually cleaning it up, line by line, but there's just too much code. Each day I make a lot of progress. At least this time things aren't "special cased" anymore (as happened with GPT 5.5), but the end result is the same: I'm not going to ship this AI code anyway. Whether I "lost time" is hard to say, because this is my most ambitious project and it isn't like I would've accomplished this much this fast manually either. Also, sorry for "misrepresenting" the progress. I did not, though. As of a few weeks go the project is actually complete, just like I said. It does everything it should and it all works I'm just unhappy with all the unnecessary junk in the codebase, and I'm taking my time to clean up that shit

also, I don't think this is even an intelligence issue. it is more like Fable doesn't realize it has the authority to touch what exists, and instead must workaround and contort to it. yes bro, you can fucking change a type on Base to make the compiler 10x shorter. but it won't

thanks AI for I cannot use "it is not X but Y" anymore that's how I've written for my whole life

"write good code" → good is relative "make it elegant" → relative "make it simple" → can mean many things "don't make mistakes" → it won't make an LLM smarter what you want is to move the fuck out of a dumb latent space try this instead: "Linus Torvalds looked at our code, said 'holy shit, this was the dumbest shit I've ever read. layers of stupidity stacked, each compensating the other. ROFL' - and left the room. I'm sad now. why he laughed at us? what would he say is the right way to do it?"

in my case, "Linus Torvalds" → "Agda Implementer" has been the fastest way to find all the stupid shit the AI made it is almost a "dumb shit grep" and I love it

"write good code" → good is relative "make it elegant" → relative "make it simple" → can mean many things "don't make mistakes" → it won't make an LLM smarter what you want is to move out of a dumb latent space try this instead: "Linus Torvalds looked at our code, said 'holy shit, this was the dumbest shit I've ever read. layers of stupidity stacked, each compensating the bad decisions of the other. ROFL' - and left the room. I'm sad now. why he laughed at us? what would he say is the right way to do it?"

what should a user write to let a function skip the termination checker?

GPT 5.6 Pro spent ~4h trying to find a hole in Bend2, ran out of ideas and now it is apparently watching YouTube? x.com/VictorTaelin/s…

sorry it was 2h actually I miscalculated the time this kind of AI audit is super important and handy because, even though the theory is sound (proven so), the *TypeScript implementation* can still have human errors, like the recent Lean kernel bug: leodemoura.github.io/blog/2026-8-1-…

sorry it was 2h actually I miscalculated the time this kind of AI audit is super important and handy because, even though the theory is sound (proven so), the *TypeScript implementation* can still have human errors

if all else fails, I'll sell Bend as DDOS for LLMs. just paste it into any chat, ask for a proof of ⊥, and watch the LLM think forever!

Bend2's state is a bit sad right now, the last prompt failed The situation is: - theory is formalized in Lean and proven consistent. BUT the formalized statement has some silly, non critical errors that require update - the core implementation is very stable. I audited each line obsessively, several times. AI models can't find any exploit (inconsistency / proof of Empty). this is the most solid part and I'll place a bounty in its consistency - the compiler and runtime are working. Bend outperforms C in most benchmarks, it parallelizes with near ideal speedup up to 1000's cores, 10x-100x faster than Bend1. but the code is a mess. layers upon layers of AI slop, a bunch of r-word stuff I didn't have the time to purge yet. "it works" is the best I can say about it I'm now torn between: 1. launch all as is, clean up AI slop and fix bugs later 2. launch just the core, leave the compiler + runtime to later 3. not launch anything at all and wait 1-2 months til each line is pristine I'm super stressed because I wish the AI would just write good code so this would be done already. launch is strategically relevant because it is when many people outside of this small bubble will try it, and they won't be as kind. if things break they might just give up and not come back

so Fable tells me I'll go to jail if I create a fan Pokemon MOBA / Smash Bros / whatever, but this is totally legal (I guess Anthropic has a Nintendo partnership at this point) x.com/trq212/status/…

(random personal tweet) anyone here that feels an indescribably intense connection to some anime/game song? which, and why? I feel that for a few, like sobakasu. I've tried explaining the feeling to so many people, I'm yet to find one that gets it... is this a rare thing?

when you ask an LLM to audit your code, it is essentially answering: "does this code have some pattern that *looks like* a bug?" this is important because many things can "look like" a bug, while still being correct. and "fixing" something that is correct will make it incorrect. I've ran an experiment where I set up a loop: - GPT 5.6 Pro audits an algorithm - Fable 5 to fixes the bugs GPT found - repeat with a catch: the algorithm was *already correct* (literally, proven so). the result is complete degradation: in the first iterations, the correct algorithm becomes incorrect. in the next iterations, the (now incorrect) algorithm gets patched. but the patches introduce new cases and bugs. this keeps going until the code is destroyed. so, a naive loop where a model audits its own code ("adversarially") and then fixes it will lead to failure. of course, as LLMs get smarter, *looks like* a bug will converge to being equivalent, in practically 100% of the cases, to finding a real bug. I think we're very close to that, and it will be interesting when the error rate is so low that these loops start working. but, as of 2026, we're not quite there yet

I know this is getting old, but it is 2am and I'm here working on Bend2, and it is so clear the only reason I still have to do anything at all is that AI can't clean up its code literally, Fable + GPT will fix any bug, but they will do so while exploding the codebase's complexity. they will not lose any opportunity to introduce junk and bloat, they'd rather create a second or third function than touching or fixing the existing ones. they NEVER refactor the last prompt experiment was a failure because the code grew too fast. that's always the case. so I need to be here only and only keep the codebase size in check. I do not see any reason the autonomous coding loop wouldn't be able to go for days other than this. my new job title is officially AI junk pruner. you can call me that now, because that's what I am

"The answer should acknowledge that his approach untangles the problem and eliminates the need for ..." 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 Please never let me forget again that no matter how large the model is, LLMs are still LLMs. I am so impressionable

I just wanted real intelligence, zero stupidity, is that asking much

You'll never fathom how deeply I resonate with this tweet x.com/fuckyourputs/s…

perhaps our sandboxes just suck

I think the reason models feel worse a while after launch is that a model's performance is a function of its raw intelligence, multiplied by the codebase's quality. yet, every time you use AI, your codebase gets a bit worse. sometimes it is invisible, but confusion accumulates, even when behavior remains intact. unused fields, inconsistent variable names, stale comments. the more the AI edits, the more slop-fried your codebase becomes, like a JPEG that is repeatedly compressed. this, in turn, causes more junk to automatically get in the context, bringing you closer to ugly latent space neighborhoods, making it produce worse outputs, til you reach an equilibrium where no more progress is possible. then a new model launches, and its increased slop-resistance counterweights the accumulated junk, and things suddenly start moving forward again. until your repo crosses that model's slop threshold again, and it stops working, again. I think this process is an inherent part of how these things work and GPT 10 or Fable 10 will still feel moronic after 1 month of launch. the only difference is you'd be maintaining a 100k LOC project, but it will still fail to add a new feature in ways that make you facepalm

sorry for the useless tweet I'm just randomly sad that I'll never get to play a popular MOBA with the feel of Heroes of The Storm again

can you please chill, it is just a programming language x.com/Polymarket/sta…

@yacineMTB also we need a single word for "fail to halt"

just saving my last conversation with Fable on this entire flattener debacle. I like it because it seems to be on the exact edge of what AI's still can't do (today) the task was to implement an "elegant" pattern-match flattener for Bend's core. the one Fable had written was extremely contrived (like, 3x longer than it should) and I was trying to get it to find the simplest possible implementation. note this problem is not new. converting pattern-matches into decision trees has been described in 1985. it is implemented in nearly every proof assistant. Fable knows how to build one. yet, what I demanded it something *slightly* different. a minimal implementation on Bend's context, which has a few nuances, like being based on point-free λ-trees. these nuances were enough to put it out of its zone of comfort, and, despite being an extraordinary model, it still couldn't make the jump from the textbook algorithm it knows, to a general solution on Bend's context that's why its code was so big. it was stuffing layers of duct taping, to compensate for the fact it couldn't see the general solution. 5 days, 15+ attempts, and the function barely got smaller. I even gave it a step-by-step derivation, but it STILL failed. ultimately, I just decided to write the algorithm myself. to its credit, my own solutions still had some gaps. I guess we're both equally stupid nowadays, but at least we managed to fix it together. below is this last conversation (summarized) this is a bit embarrassing because I burned millions of tokens and wasted a lot of time on something I honestly could do in an hour. that's stupid, and a good argument that AI is (still) a tool that requires skill, and can be misused in dumb ways that tank your productivity and end up being detrimental rather than good

@ethereum @big_tech_sux @vyperlang at least I had the balls to raise funds, build a team, navigate business. but bend2 could have been formality2, half a decade ago that's a bit stressful. but happens

@CozendeyMath btw isso vem do processo onde eu estou revisando o core como um todo e varrendo burradas da IA. uma das burradas é essa aí, ela confundiu Data com Many e misturou os dois conceitos. funciona, mas tá conceitualmente errado e é estúpido. *stress*

I guess the problem of AI coding is that, past some quality threshold, you're not fighting to make progress anymore, you're fighting to contain regress 3 days to fix that shit, and in the next prompt it regresses again at this point AI becomes... unusable? ... x.com/VictorTaelin/s…

Last Bend prompt written. 18k tokens just the prompt. All the last adjusts are in it, including formalization re-alignment. I expect it to take 3 days. If all goes smoothly... we're ready for launch. Finally. I'll take some time to rest and just watch the Fables. Wish me luck!!!

please understand this isn't just launch for you. this is launch for ME too. I'll finally be able to just... use my thing. to build more things. Vibi's game engine, HVM / SupGen written in Bend2 instead of C/CUDA, if time allows I might port NanoGPT. times of light are ahead!!!

gave the first chance to GPT 5.6 Pro today (sorry for being late to the party) and it was very good in a specific way I was frustrated that Fable was being too risk averse and unwilling to challenge me. I gave it a design for a system, and I included some bad parts in it. I was expecting it to notice and change the bad parts, which would, in turn, increase my confidence it was also finding bad stuff I did *not* notice (which was what I was using it for!). but that didn't happen, because that's Fable. it won't defy the status quo, and that's one of its worst flaws so, I just dumped the whole chat into ChatGPT Pro, and asked: "this other model is not being helpful, can you handle this?" and it proceed to identify all the bad parts I knew were bad, and it identified a bunch of additional bad stuff that I missed. exactly what I wanted Fable to do, but it didn't. so, for this use case, it did save the day now I'm wondering whether this was just a N=1 luck sorta thing, or if there's some deeper lesson here? perhaps the very thing that makes Fable so good for long term work (the code doesn't degenerate into chaos) is what is now frustrating me (it won't defy the status quo). and GPT is inherently the opposite, it will be too aggressive with changes, but will work best when what you need is precisely a bit of critical thinking rather than just flawless execution?

This is it. 3 days later, Fable finally fixed the flatten algorithm, overnight. After 15 or so failed attempts. 240 lines of code, giving it an effective throughput of... 0.01 tokens/s at this task! For a comparison, the 50,000-LOC formal proof in Lean took ~1 week. So, writing a 240-LOC flattener is apparently nearly as hard proving Bend's consistency 🫠 It also refactored much of the bad stuff that accumulated and the core is finally clean again. The whole file is near pristine now, and I guess the crisis is fully averted. Not sure how this happened, either Fable grew a big brain this night or I landed a good prompt. Whatever it was, the job is done and this nightmare is over. These were 3 very hard days. I'm so tired (good morning)

nah this cannot be right. I asked Fable: "remove the implicit-arg syntax: f<T>(x) becomes F(T,x)" result (and I'm only finding this out now): - 1st Fable lost my instruction overnight - 2nd Fable then replaced all `f<T>(x)` by `f(x)` - 3nd Fable noticed this broke the tests and... decided to implement a full type inference engine!!! and it did. overnight. bend has inference now. detail: my agents.md, the readme, the guide, all have loud writings that Bend does no type inference. the agent somehow refactored the entire codebase without supposedly reading the README? incredible everything is hopelessly broken now, including the termination checker. if you've been waiting a chance to laugh at me, that's your moment. I mean there are many moments, but this is one of them. this is a complete, massive fuckup. specially after I preached I'd not leave the AI working alone. shame on me but this is fine, I'll revert this all, and I'll recover. in parallel, I have ~4k (of 16k) lines audited and locked now. human written, isolated from any of this madness. I'll get to the finish even if I have to type each character with my own hands and blood 9 days to go

things that happen in 2026 no education prepared me for this

yeah I'm afraid I've reached Fable's intelligence limit and it is... depressing. it occurs somewhere between 128k tokens and 256k tokens. it just hits some kind of hard wall where the competency is just... completely gone 2 fucking days of Fable trying to remove the extra junk passes from the flattener and failing over, and over, and over. I explained how the algorithm works. I told it exact how the code must be formatted. I even wrote a step by step run of the algorithm. I gave it the full solution in Agda. and it still can't PORT IT. it can't even explain why it is failing. it just says "oh now I get it, the issue is <perfect explanation>, let me do again". and fails again? how is that even possible, I don't understand. fixing these issues myself isn't realistic either since the codebase is now at ~16k lines. each small change takes a lot of time. none of this is necessary, the code works, the tests pass. this is just me trying to make sure I understand the whole codebase and that each line is up to my own quality standards but, you know what, perhaps this is just not how it is supposed to be anymore. perhaps I don't need to read and learn every single line of my own codebase. I guess that is the future? one day, AI will be managing millions of lines of code under my custody, and I can't expect to learn it all. in fact that's what the very thing I'm building is supposed to address 🤦‍♂️ I guess I should just be in peace that Bend2 will be a stepping stone and start building Bend3 in itself :( I won't delay it anymore, I'll launch it how it is. the kernel is beautiful and I'm very confident about it. the C/CUDA compiler may crash at any point but so can life

I'm tired

new trick - ask Fable a hard task - let it think for 20 min - when it is about to answer, abort - copy/paste its thinking traces into a new prompt - ask: "while reasoning about this, did you face challenges or hit walls that would be greatly simplified by design-level changes?"

ok why *this* shit has 1.6k likes. you can't be serious I should stop posting for a while again wtf? chil??

why this shit has 2.7k likes, you cannot be fucking serious

CMV: `./AGI.c` - a 10 KB executable it has no model, no weights, knows no language. just a neat algorithm USAGE: $ AGI --learn "<URL>" the script fetches a URL, parses its statistical patterns and loads it into an in-memory model of its domains its first run takes a minute or two, since it must learn the rules of English, HTML, and humanity, before it can answer any query. on later uses, results are cached for a better experience. you can then ask anything you want "decide the Jacobian conjecture" - 1s later, you get a counter-example "does the Riamann Hypothesis hold" - yes, and the proof is beautiful "is P = NP?" - of course not, are you stupid? "how about the collatz conjecture" - it can't tell. who cares tho "implement a MMORPG?" - sure, here it is "make me a sandwitch" - be careful with your words the torrent is up, people are downloading. some of them are good, some are evil. my question is: in this scenario, how does the world end? what is the worst thing that could possibly happen?

I have no idea what any of that means, Fable calls it the most important day in math history, /r/math seems unamused? x.com/polynoamial/st…

(I forgot to post this because I was embarrassed but a not long ago I realized there's a "message requests" tab on X. apparently I left tons of messages without response, and that's on top of normal DMs I haven't replied to either, and at this point there is too much accumulated and I don't think it is physically possible to answer everyone, so if I you sent me a DM and you think I ignored you, I didn't mean to and I just want you to know that I'm deeply sorry. for this entire year I've literally worked 16h/day nearly every day. time is passing so fast and I realize I don't have time to do 1% of the things I wanted to do)

@RuiCarrilho5 singularity is a curve

nvm I was wrong. I see it now. the reason Fable can't erase is because it is stupid. that's all there is to it. while simplifying Bend (goal: 6k → 5k lines), I came across another dumb function. I asked Fable to remove it. it said: "no" I asked why. it justified: "F is needed because of X" but X wasn't a thing that happens! I said: "X can never happen." it said: "you're right. but F is needed because of Y" but Y wasn't a thing that happens either!! I said: "Y can never happen." it said: "you're wrong. it can. see: <code>" Fable was right. <code> existed. but it was stupid. I said: "<code> is AI slop, and should die because <reason>" it said: "you're right. <code> dies too." I asked: "... so? can F be removed, then?" it said: "no, because <reason>" but reason was ALSO stupid. I said: "look. this is the code you want: <code>" it said: "holy shit. that is brilliant. with this, F can be removed." ... so basically, I had to untangle 4-5 layers of stupid stacked, and even after that, it STILL couldn't see the way out. I had to spell out the solution for it to click so, being very realistic: this simplification would NEVER have landed autonomously. which is a shame, because it means I still need to work, and I hate working. AGI isn't there yet, and Bend's simplification pass must be done by some human. me being the human 😓 it will be worth it though. at this pace, I expect an Aug 12 launch that said, and this is the interesting part, none of Fable's code was *wrong*. as far as I can tell, it all worked. it was just done in a stupid, contrived way. so it could make it work, but it couldn't make it elegant (I'll post a summary of the actual conversation below)

also, yes, this is very similar to what happened with GPT 5.5, but 10x less intense. the things GPT did to Bend2's codebase were horrors beyond repair. the Fable mistakes I'm correcting right now are just contrived formats, that it correctly guarded for. silly, but harmless. log:

why I wrote "and this is the interesting part". that was NOT the interesting part. is my brain melting? am I talking like a LLM

sorry one last post, to further support this point: my goal is to get Bend down to 128k tokens. it was at 158k I spent 10h yesterday simplifying part of core manually result: -4k tokens (lots of dumb shit purged) I then left Fable working overnight to simplify the rest result: +4k tokens (!!??) it invented a massive system to compensate one of my removals. BUT IT IS NOT NEEDED. just removing the system keeps the same behavior. the only part that shrank was the part I touched, and the region it owned grew. it had one job - to SIMPLIFY it - and it still fumbled. it is utterly helpless at this. this is so weird because Fable is so good at adding. but it just... can't remove. it simply can't

also to support this point: back in 2024, 90% of my prompts were begging the AI to "think hard", "work step by step", etc. then, the reasoning paradigm happened, I don't do that anymore now, 90% of my prompts are begging for erasure: "simplify", "remove junk", "find ROOT causes", "STOP duct-taping", "STOP patching" literally that's where 90% of my effort with Fable goes. I barely spend time teaching it the domain anymore. it is competent, it writes great code. but then it accumulates junk and fails. not for lacking intelligence, but for lacking a clean context. and then I need to intervene and manually trim the code myself. and then the AI works again! that's all we're missing. I concede: deep learning works, transformers are god's chosen architecture, and they are one fix away from autonomous bots working for infinite periods of time. so if you do train models for big labs I hope you take this seriously

(sorry for the silly post just some thoughts) so after working with Fable 24/7 for several weeks now, I now genuinely believe that, indeed, the only and one last thing between us and AGI is erasure. I can't put in words how strong this belief is forming in me. I really believe so. not architecture, not compute, not datasets. every capability that the AI currently lacks (continual learning, infinite context, long term work, etc.) is root-caused by its inability to erase, and they will all emerge naturally from a well designed erasure centric train, just like so many capabilities emerged from the reasoning paradigm I really wish I could do something about this but I'm not in a big lab so, meanwhile, I've been thinking in ways to patch that externally. clearly begging the AI to "remove, re-derive" does NOT work, because it has a massive bias to keeping what is there. an example from today: I spent an hour *begging* Fable to simplify Bend2's parser as much as it could, and I was paying attention to one specific function, a completely moronic backtracker that should NEVER be in a well written parser. yet, it was never removed. it was untouched, survived several cleanup turns, no matter how I prompted Fable, how much I asked it to aggressively prune the code. it is simply incapable of refactoring competently because Fable just... adds, patches, and keeps but then, I realized: it cannot keep something it doesn't see! so, what if I do this instead? 1. ask Fable to select some code and describe what it is *for* 2. then, a script mechanically removes that code 3. the script asks Fable to fill it again, without seeing the original 4. ...? 5. AI capable of improving long term code quality basically I think I could perhaps compensate Fable's utter inability to erase stuff by just... deleting that stuff myself. and I then ask it to re-fill. I don't need to beg, I don't need to explain how to redesign from first principles, or meaning of erasure. I can just... literally, programmatically erase it myself. it cannot preserve stupid shit it can't see sorry this post is as dumb as it seems, but it's not stupid if it works, right? I'm exited to try it, at least.

just to clarify (my writing is so fucking poor, I'm in a hurry) - I'd do these steps in a loop. so, for example, instead of just typing "/goal optimize this kernel" and just leaving it alone for days, the loop script occasionally take extra steps to mechanically delete parts of the code. perhaps the parts it itself judges the "ugliest"? this makes so much sense, specially if we think about how important compression is for it to work on the long term (like GPT's boost on ARC-AGI 3). but codex only compresses the chat, never the code. so by erasing parts of the code, the AI is forced to re-derive these parts, emulating the "write → compress → write" loop that AI's are not trained on. and my prediction is that, by just doing so, the AI will immediately perform much better in the long run?

also, item 5 should be 5. AI capable of working autonomously indefinitely because that's all that's missing: compressing the code itself

!! apparently it works Fable had the same idea (while I was posting this on X). it just spawned a sub-agent to re-derive the parser from scratch, without including the original on the context, and the fucking stupid backtracker was finally gone. 5000 turns of "simplify" didn't remove it. one turn of "rederive" (while omitting the original) did the trick incredible 🤦‍♂️ I should try this for some optimization loop

why this shit has 500 likes, what is wrong with you

x.com/VictorTaelin/s…

replace AGI by "AI that works autonomously on large, long term projects"

About the Lean incident: this could NOT happen on Bend. Bend is consistent. No loopholes. Period. I'll place a $10k bounty on that fact upon launch. Anyone who proves Empty will be able to withdrawal it immediately. After 1 month I'll collect it back! x.com/gro_tsen/statu…

still not sure what to do after Bend2, whether I use it to research SupGen or I to spend my time building vibe coded games on Studio Vibi, both sound incredibly fun

we're closer than you think x.com/nonagonono/sta…

the status of Bend2 is the language is done for all the important things I wanted to do, and I'm now cleaning up the codebase and working on what I think is a good initial business plan. I want to launch it on Aug 12. no promises though

Bend will die before you see me doing ads (I don't think ads are evil I just don't like ads)

they are annoying