Blog — not the dev journal
Field notes from the foundry.
Ideas, arguments, and the occasional benchmark. For the day-by-day build log, see the dev journal.
The journey · 4 min
You can't one-shot the trail
We drew 111 days of building werbos as a hiking trail — the runs, the walls, the dead ends we backtracked out of, the false summits. The backtracks are the proof it couldn't be prompted into existence.
Play · 4 min
The arcade is the exam
werbos has a whole arcade — chess, Connect-4, Wordle, poker, a murder mystery, tarot, debate. It looks like a toy bolted on for fun. It's actually the test suite, wearing a fun coat.
Tools · 3 min
How you write, not who you are
A tiny werbos tool that measures the fingerprint of any prose — caps, emoji, rhythm, vocabulary, the words you reach for — and then, on purpose, refuses to tell you what it means about you.
Receipts · 4 min
$18 a loss-point
We put the entire training run of our owned base model on the wall — seven panels, every number derived from the telemetry, including the graph that proved us wrong.
Dogfooding · 6 min
18 cards and no LLM: the bot on this page
We put a chat bot on our own site — and there's no language model behind it, on purpose. Here's why a small curated library that says "I don't know" beats a cloud chatbot that guesses.
Economics · 6 min
The $50-a-day agent, and why it should cost 3 cents
The real math on running an always-on agent locally vs. renting one.
Trust · 8 min
In defense of "I don't know"
Why honest-abstain beats a confident hallucination every single time.
Ownership · 5 min
Renting intelligence was always a bad deal
Owning the weights changes the entire relationship. Here's how.