Hello, and what this is

A paper is the polished end of a long, messy process. By the time it ships, the doubts are sanded off and the dead ends deleted—good for the reader, bad for the record. The most useful part, how you actually got there, is exactly what gets thrown away.

And now we face the AI era, staring straight at it: much of what we stood on, and believed deeply, may no longer be true. When the artifact gets cheap, the thinking is what’s left.

So this is the other thing—a place for the rough cut. Notes on systems, verification, and faithful LLM systems. Arguments with myself. Ideas that aren’t papers and may never be.

Code is cheap. Show me the thoughts.

—Cheng Tan