Contribute
This estate is built in the open — code, gates, failures and all — and contribution is a pull request away. Nothing lands here any other way, including the operator’s own work.
What contribution genuinely is here — limits first. Several of the working repositories are private: client work and unpublished science live in them. What is public for those projects is a redacted live mirror, updated by promotion: one commit per promotion, each recording the private commit it came from, and every promotion merged by a person through a pull request. So a contributor works against the mirror exactly as the operator works against the live sites — pull requests are how everything lands here. This page can tell you where the repositories are, how a change lands, and which acts stay with the operator. It cannot promise a review deadline: this is a co-op with one named responsible human, not a staffed help desk. Mirror states below were read from the generated manifest at build time, not probed live.
Where to start
The public technical documentation of the estate, where every volatile number is generated from the repository it describes and carries the commit it was read from.
This site. MIT-licensed, Next.js, statically exported, every page generated. A good first contribution: a broken link, a sentence that says less than it seems to, a page whose plain-language reading path uses a term it never taught. Fix the generator or the source — never the rendered number.
The working repository itself is public —
open it. What you clone is what the operator works in.
A pedagogical BEAM-native active-inference workbench: discrete-time POMDP with mean-field variational message passing and an expected-free-energy-weighted policy posterior, plus a 10-chapter curriculum, a visual model builder, and browser learning labs.
MIT-licensed and developed fully in the open: the active-inference engine, the curriculum, and the browser learning labs. A good first contribution: a lab fix, a module doc that mis-states the equation it implements, or a chapter result you tried to reproduce and could not — written up as a report.
The working repository itself is public —
open it. What you clone is what the operator works in.
A pure-Elixir categorical active-inference colony: embodied agents living in a real Minecraft world, each running one mean-field predict-act tick as its life, with a broadcast platform built over it.
A good first contribution: run what the mirror tree claims runs and report where the claim and the run part company. A test that passes for the wrong reason is a finding too.
The working repository is private. A redacted
live mirror is public, updated 2026-08-31: it tracks the private repository by promotion, one commit per promotion, each recording the private commit it came from, and every promotion is merged by a person through a pull request. Contributions are made against the mirror.
(mirror state measured 2026-08-31)A CPU-only digital-organ laboratory that keeps a bacterial flagellar-motor world process strictly separate from the active-inference agent that models it.
The science instrument. The single most valuable thing a stranger can do here is attempt a reproduction and report the failure precisely: which command, which commit, what was expected, what happened instead. A reproduction that fails is not a complaint — it is the product working.
The working repository is private. A redacted
live mirror is public, updated 2026-08-31: it tracks the private repository by promotion, one commit per promotion, each recording the private commit it came from, and every promotion is merged by a person through a pull request. Contributions are made against the mirror.
(mirror state measured 2026-08-31)An encyclopedia and a literal cookbook of buildable recipes across a developmental ladder, governed by two sovereign ledgers that never let a nature citation count as a UNI result.
A cookbook of buildable recipes. A recipe that does not build as written is a defect in the book, not in the reader. A good first contribution: follow one recipe to the letter and report every place it assumes something it never stated.
The working repository is private. A redacted
live mirror is public, updated 2026-08-24: it tracks the private repository by promotion, one commit per promotion, each recording the private commit it came from, and every promotion is merged by a person through a pull request. Contributions are made against the mirror.
(mirror state measured 2026-08-24)This list is curated to the repositories that take contributions; it is not the whole estate. The full inventory — including the projects with no public repository at all, and the stated reason for each — is the hallway.
The Workbench carries its own contributor contract in the repository: CONTRIBUTING.md (quoted at pinned commit c2c9c724). Its closing line is the register of the whole estate: “If a rule seems to conflict with a legitimate use case, raise the question in the PR rather than working around it. The rules exist because the maintainers have been bitten by the alternative.” It also asks that documentation borrow a three-word verification vocabulary — verified (backed by a passing end-to-end test), scaffolded (compiles, no end-to-end test yet), uncertain (known gap or open question) — so a claim always says which of the three it is.
The contract a contribution enters
Short enough to quote, and every clause is enforced somewhere rather than aspired to:
- Only source-pinned recorded measurements may be labelled observed. A reconstruction, a simulation, a model output — none of these is ever relabelled.
- Adverse results are published, never buried. A failed reproduction, a falsified prediction, a gate that fails — these lead, they do not footnote.
- A claim ships with its falsifier: the observation that would kill it, named before the evidence is looked at.
- Gates must pass — and a pull request that weakens a test in order to pass is rejected on principle. Softening the instrument is worse than failing it.
The estate’s record of its own failures is kept deliberately public at what went wrong, and the gates that enforce the contract are inventoried at the gates.
How this site itself takes edits
Every volatile number on these pages is generated from the repository it describes and carries the commit it was read at. So the fix for a wrong number is never an edit to the rendered page: fix the generator, or fix the source it reads, and rebuild. A number typed into a page is a claim with a half-life — this estate once measured one at 176 seconds (2026-07-29), which is why the rule is absolute.
Before any pull request, run npm run gate. It verifies the generator chain, the coverage manifest, provenance, and public consistency — and its publish-safety pass scans every emitted byte for private machine paths and credential-shaped strings, so a leak fails the build before it can ship. How the site is put together is documented at how it is built, and what it deliberately is not is at not an LLM.
Teaching contributions
The teaching surfaces take contributions that are not code fixes:
- New labs. A lab is a self-contained single-file HTML page — no build step, no network after load, every vendored dependency byte-verified against a pinned hash. See the labs for the shape a lab takes.
- Lens prose. The plain-language and clear reading paths of a page are written by hand and reviewed by a human, not machine-paraphrased. Improving one is a contribution; so is reporting a place where a lens says less than the precise text it stands in for.
- Translations. Course sessions can be translated. A translation is reviewed as prose, not accepted as a mechanical substitution — see the course for the sessions as they stand.
What is not open to contribution, and why
The private working repositories. Client work and unpublished science live in them, and no amount of goodwill makes it safe to open them wholesale. What is safe to publish is promoted to the mirrors, commit by commit, by a person — that boundary is the contribution model, not an obstacle to it.
The operator’s sign-off acts.Verdicts on scientific claims, publications, and the small class of repairs the contract reserves to a human are his and stay his. This is a co-op with a named responsible human at the centre, and the estate’s whole discipline depends on that boundary staying visible: an agent or a contributor can prepare everything up to the signature, and the signature is not transferable.
To see what that boundary protects, walk the hallway, try the labs, read the course — and read what went wrong, because the failures are the best argument this page has that the rest is told straight.