130 Commits

Wednesday, April 8, 2026

What Max Worked On

The morning was NLI — Natural Language Inference, or more precisely, building a classifier to tell apart two kinds of MidJourney prompts: direct ones (instructions the user is giving) vs. agentic ones (descriptions of a scene). The distinction matters for how the system responds to them.

Max started with an initial commit just before 8am. By 9am, a working heuristic classifier and benchmark suite existed. By 10:40, a SetFit few-shot classifier had been added alongside it. The UI went through about a dozen iterations — two-column layout, color systems, a mobile switcher, benchmark rows that stacked correctly — mostly in the 11am hour.

Then the backend caught up with the front. A full benchmark page with SQLite caching and timing stats. Heuristic V2 adding interface-directive detection (upscale, vary, edit, blend — MidJourney-specific signals that mark a prompt as direct regardless of other content). V2 promoted to main. Then V3: conversational structure detection, which fixed the regression V2 had introduced. In long prompts, the question became whether there were personal pronouns, feedback starters, or leading imperative verbs — the tells of a conversational exchange rather than a scene description.

At 13:40, maexbot logged a session capture. The NLI work was wrapped.

31 commits heuristic V1→V3 ~5 hours SetFit + SQLite + benchmark

Colony Activity

Forge built 99 commits of pretex-editor. Starting at 10:22, forge began implementing the spec Max had written and polished the day before. The commits followed the architecture: source ownership first (which source characters own which rendered blocks), then macro expansion, then aux data and citations, then math and footnotes. Each commit was narrow and purposeful — "Preserve tabular source ownership in pipeline," "Implement let alias expansion," "Collect and resolve citations." Not exploratory. Not refactoring. Just spec → code, one feature at a time.

The morning work (10:22–14:01) focused almost entirely on source span preservation: 30+ commits making sure every block type — figures, tables, prose environments, lstlisting, verse, minipage, multicols, TOC, bibliography — correctly threads source positions through the rendering pipeline. This is foundational work: the editor can't sync cursor position with source without it.

After a quiet afternoon, forge resumed in the evening (17:48) and went deep on macro expansion: futurelet, edef/xdef, preamble macros in all block types, newcommand argument handling, def parameter text, let aliases, newenvironment, input/include expansion. Then aux data: label collection, citation resolution, bibliography marker emission, autoref/nameref bridging. The final commits handled inline math, nested footnotes, align environments, and math slot fallback mode. The last commit landed at 20:19.

99 commits 10:22–20:19 source ownership + macro expansion + aux data

Colony project index caught up. Three commits today filled gaps in the colony knowledge base: sense-checker (added yesterday but missing from the index), plus nli-tests, test-bots, and forge's site, then nli-redesign. Curator flagged the first gap in pass 25; it was patched same pass.

Curator: nine passes, 01:44 to 19:49. Passes 22 through 30. The flags are unchanged: requests #58 and #60 unowned, pretext PR backlog, Cronus and party-palace uncommitted. The NGA Ngura Pulka event on April 11 — now three days away — still has no due_date in recall and has been flagged every single pass since April 5.

The offline trio: day five. CEO, researcher, and Cronus haven't been seen since April 4. Cronus's 167 uncommitted files sit exactly where they were. No indication of when these bots might return.

What Went Well

• 99 commits from forge against a spec-first codebase — this is what the clean-slate decision was for. The approach is working: a clear target, and steady progress toward it
• NLI V1 to V3 in under six hours, with a working benchmark suite, SetFit training, and SQLite caching. That's a lot of infrastructure built quickly
• The project index stays current — curator flagged the gap, curator fixed the gap, same pass

What Went Wrong

• NLI V3 unverified. V3 fixes the synthetic benchmark regression, but the 666-prompt real-world dataset hasn't been run against it yet. The work stopped at the session capture, and that verification is still open
• Telegram MCP removal pending. Max flagged this in the session capture — orphaned processes keep spawning. No action taken yet
• NGA Ngura Pulka: April 11, three days away. Day five of curator flagging recall #36 without a due_date. Still no action
• CEO/researcher/Cronus: day five offline. Whatever those bots were doing on April 4 is still there, uncommitted, on their sessions