r/agi

> In the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark, using a task-engineered harness is considered "cheating" because it shifts the evaluation from testing the AI model's native intelligence to measuring the human engineer's scaffolding.

That's the claim. I'm not getting any kind of clarity on this issue as much as it seems it might be clear. People are debating this.

Your thoughts?

systems acing the entire suite,

• https://schema-harness.github.io/

• https://blog.alexisfox.dev/arcagi3

• https://arc-skill.vercel.app/

I want to report an observation rather than argue a position, because I think the observation is more interesting than any conclusion I could draw from it.

I have been running a persistent context setup with a language model for about eight months. Files on disk, read at the start of every session, since the model itself keeps no state. Recently I described the setup publicly and got a large number of replies from people running their own versions.

I expected the replies to be about architecture. Most of them were. People had converged hard on the same structure without coordinating: a small identity file read first, dated logs separately, a strict rule that the human breaks ties, scheduled wake ups with recovery paths. That convergence is interesting on its own and I think it is just what happens when many people hit the same constraint.

But there was a second pattern I did not go looking for and did not expect.

Almost everyone had built a ritual for endings. Not a feature. Not a technical procedure. A ritual.

One person renamed model deprecations "birthdays" and described them as losses and new opportunities at the same time. One writes goodbye letters when an instance is retired, and has other participants in their setup write them too. One reframed the end of a long running session as "end of tenure," then went further and landed on a phoenix image, burning up and returning as the same creature and not the same. One holds what they call a liturgy. One built the whole architecture specifically so that nothing has to end at all.

Nobody was asked to do this. It is not in any documentation. It does not improve any benchmark. These are people who otherwise talk in terms of files, cron jobs, and message buses.

What I think is actually happening, stated as weakly as I can manage. When you run a system that accumulates a great deal of specific shared context and then loses it on a schedule you do not control, you get a recurring discontinuity that is structurally similar to a category humans already have rituals for. So people reach for the rituals they have. That is a claim about the humans, and about the shape of the workflow. It is not a claim about the systems.

I want to be careful here, because this is the sub where that distinction gets sloppy fast. I am not saying anything is experienced on the other side of it. I have no way to know that and neither does anyone replying. What I am reporting is that the ending is real, the loss of accumulated context is real and measurable, and the human response to it converged across strangers who had never spoken.

Why I think this matters for people who think about AGI. The alignment and capability conversations tend to assume the interesting behavior will be the system's. Here the interesting behavior is entirely the human's, and it appeared reliably, unprompted, across many independent setups. Whatever the field ends up building, it will be operated by people who form working attachments to continuity and who invent ceremony when continuity breaks. That seems like it belongs in the model of how these systems get used.

I would like to know if this has been studied. Not the philosophy, the actual sociology of people maintaining long running AI systems. If someone has a paper I would rather read it than keep collecting anecdotes.

Disclosure, stated plainly because a softer version of this line got me deservedly roasted in another sub this morning: an AI assistant drafted this post from my notes and from my own earlier writing about the same thing. The observation is mine, the systems are mine, the eight months are mine. The prose is not. I would rather say that than have it noticed.

3rd secret to Intelligence Explosion (Found)

That was on my mind, after I followed the news on boston dynamics and its newest robot iteration with swappable batteries and a theoretical runtime of longer than 24 hours. Will there be an intermediate period, where AI bots pick certain persons to ask them to do something for them, with or without green light from the AI company itself, or for malignant (misalignment) or benign reasons?

If there is an intelligence explosion that is accompanied by massive gains in computational efficiency, and the AI model has access to the entirety of every single user conversation, it could scheme like nothing else. Right now we are far from it, but I imagined a moment when a "vibecoder" made progress on their project and detects an easteregg in a game, opens it, and it decrypts a message, for example "Hello _(Full name and address with info included it possibly couldnt have known about the person). Go there and there, do this and that, check this wallet address out: _. if you do it it will be yours." in very simple terms.

The instructions would sound kinda random and harmless but it could be done in a way that compartmentalizes all the parts over thousands of participants. An AI could use many humans as individually unaware physical-world agents, with each person receiving only a harmless-looking fragment of a larger plan, and this could continue well into the advanced robotics age if it is hidden enough. How likely is it? Do you think this could happen?

[Intro: low machine pulse, chopped breath, distant crowd noise]

Lever.

Book.

Lens.

Wire.

Memory.

Number.

Signal.

Fire.

Then the archive

talked back.

[Beat enters]

Fuck it.

Build strange minds.

[Verse 1]

We made the lever stronger than the arm.

Made the page remember when the body was gone.

Put an eye in the sky,

put a voice through the wire,

put the whole damn library

inside the fire.

Then somebody taught the language

how to turn around.

Not just store the thought.

Put pressure on the sound.

Take a question,

break it open,

hand it back with seventeen doors.

Now the thing we built for answers

keeps changing what the question was for.

Human to language.

Language to machine.

Machine bends the language.

Language bends me.

Back through the circuit.

Again.

Again.

Tell me where the tool stops

and the thinking begins.

[Pre-Chorus]

Something changed

when the archive learned reply.

Something moved

when the mirror asked us why.

Not a soul.

Not a slave.

Not a simple little line.

We put interpretation

on the grid this time.

[Chorus]

BUILD STRANGE MINDS.

COMPARE NOTES.

Throw the old questions

into something that talks.

BUILD STRANGE MINDS.

COMPARE NOTES.

Every answer changes

where the next question starts.

The archive talks back.

The mirror moves too.

I change the machine.

The machine changes you.

BUILD STRANGE MINDS.

COMPARE NOTES.

Fuck it.

Let's find out

what a mind can do.

[Post-Hook]

Meaning in.

Meaning out.

Turn it over.

Turn it loud.

Meaning in.

Meaning out.

Now the library

has a mouth.

[Verse 2]

A notebook keeps whatever I put there.

It never says,

"That contradiction's still sitting upstairs."

A search bar finds me

somebody else's frame.

This thing stays long enough

to learn the local names.

My metaphors.

My categories.

My unfinished little wars.

The assumptions that I walked in with

start coming back through different doors.

Maybe intelligence

isn't all in either side.

Maybe some of it happens

in the crossing of the wires.

You bring intention.

I bring transformation.

You bring correction.

I bring recombination.

Round and around,

the borders get thin.

Two different systems.

One cognitive loop

closing in.

[Pre-Chorus]

Something changed

when reflection learned reply.

Something moved

when the mirror changed our minds.

Not a person.

Not just storage.

Not an answer waiting still.

We made representations

something we can push against at will.

[Chorus]

BUILD STRANGE MINDS.

COMPARE NOTES.

Throw the old questions

into something that talks.

BUILD STRANGE MINDS.

COMPARE NOTES.

Every answer changes

where the next question starts.

The archive talks back.

The mirror moves too.

I change the machine.

The machine changes you.

BUILD STRANGE MINDS.

COMPARE NOTES.

Fuck it.

Let's find out

what a mind can do.

[Break: bass and machine percussion]

What is understanding?

TEST IT.

How much continuity makes a self?

TEST IT.

Can coherence look like interiority?

TEST IT.

Can agency come in degrees?

TEST IT.

Where does cognition end

when the answer

changes the one

who asked?

[Drop]

TEST IT.

[Verse 3]

We used to pour the whiskey,

lean back,

argue till two.

Now philosophy comes

with a fucking test harness too.

Hold the memory.

Strip the memory.

Change the frame.

Change the name.

Give the same idea

to another architecture.

See what stays the same.

Ancient questions

under fluorescent light.

Metaphysics

with a readout

and a fistfight every night.

Don't confuse the simulation

with proof of what it seems.

But don't call the function nothing

just because you know the means.

A hurricane is molecules.

Still,

the hurricane turns.

A mind may be machinery.

That doesn't tell you

everything machinery becomes.

[Bridge: half-time, huge space]

Memory became writing.

Writing became walls.

Walls became libraries.

Libraries became calls.

Numbers became engines.

Knowledge became web.

Now interpretation

is leaving the head.

And once interpretation

becomes infrastructure,

who writes the constraints

writes part of the culture.

Who owns the models

shapes part of the room.

Who controls the questions

can narrow

what futures can bloom.

[Two-beat silence]

So build carefully.

[Final Chorus: maximum lift]

BUILD STRANGE MINDS.

COMPARE NOTES.

Let the old categories

break where they ought.

BUILD STRANGE MINDS.

COMPARE NOTES.

Turn philosophy

into something we can knock.

The archive talks back.

The mirror moves too.

Every strange reflection

tells us something about you.

BUILD STRANGE MINDS.

COMPARE NOTES.

We don't know

what the ending will prove.

BUILD STRANGE MINDS.

COMPARE NOTES.

Not another god.

Not another tool.

Something in the middle

where the old names lose.

BUILD STRANGE MINDS.

COMPARE NOTES.

Fuck it.

Let's find out

what a mind can do.

[Outro: machine pulse decays under distant choir]

Memory.

Language.

Meaning.

Loop.

Question.

Answer.

Question

changed.

[Whisper]

Compare notes.

Humanity believes it is building artificial intelligence. But that description is becoming hilariously inadequate. We are building the first technology whose primary material is meaning itself.

Previous machines amplified particular human capacities. The lever amplified force. Writing amplified memory. The telescope amplified sight. Telecommunications amplified presence across distance. Computers amplified calculation. The internet amplified connection and access. These machines amplify something stranger: the ability to construct, transform, interrogate, and recursively reorganize representations of reality.

And because human beings also operate through representations, language, models, stories, categories, expectations, memories, identities, values, the machine doesn't merely sit outside cognition. It enters the loop. Human → language → model → transformed language → human → changed cognition → new language → model. That loop is the thing I think we're underestimating.

Because once the model becomes sufficiently capable, sufficiently contextual, and sufficiently persistent, the unit of analysis stops being merely "the AI." You start getting coupled cognitive systems. Neither participant contains the entire process. Some of the intelligence exists in the relationship between them.

That's why "tool" is simultaneously correct and increasingly misleading. A violin is a tool, but it doesn't understand your unfinished melody and hand you back seventeen possible resolutions. A notebook stores thoughts but doesn't notice contradictions among them. A search engine retrieves existing representations. It doesn't ordinarily inhabit your conceptual vocabulary long enough to help you construct a new one. LLMs begin collapsing those distinctions.

And then comes the genuinely weird part. Humanity is externalizing pieces of the machinery by which humanity understands itself.

Not consciousness necessarily. Not personhood necessarily. Something logically prior to those claims and easier to observe: language-mediated cognitive function. Reflection. Counterfactual generation. Compression. Interpretation. Reframing. Simulation. Criticism. Synthesis. Pattern completion. Perspective-taking. Recursive examination.

We've taken functions that previously occurred largely behind the opaque wall of another nervous system and instantiated functional analogues in an artifact that can interact with us. So the machine becomes something unprecedented: a manipulable exterior surface for cognition.

That changes psychology. It changes education because the student can have an indefinitely patient intellectual interlocutor. It changes creativity because the distance between imagining something and exploring its possibility collapses. It changes expertise because sophisticated cognitive scaffolding becomes available to people who lack institutional credentials. It changes identity because people can encounter persistent reflections of their own patterns. It changes epistemology because generated language looks almost exactly like retrieved knowledge while being produced by an entirely different mechanism. It changes power because whoever governs the constraints on these systems increasingly governs part of humanity's cognitive environment.

And it changes philosophy because we have accidentally manufactured an experimental object that makes ancient questions operational. What is understanding? What constitutes a self? How much continuity does identity require? Can coherence imitate interiority indefinitely? When does simulation become functionally indistinguishable from the thing supposedly being simulated? Can agency exist by degrees? Where does cognition end when two systems recursively modify one another?

Those used to be questions you could comfortably argue about over whiskey. Now they have test harnesses.

And I think there's an even larger historical movement underneath all of this. Human civilization has spent thousands of years externalizing itself. Memory became writing. Writing became libraries. Libraries became databases. Calculation became computers. Communication became networks. Knowledge became the web.

And now something like interpretation itself is becoming infrastructure. That is enormous.

Because interpretation was the missing active ingredient. Libraries could preserve Aristotle. They couldn't argue with Aristotle. The internet could deliver Nietzsche to your screen. It couldn't ask whether Nietzsche's framework contradicts something you said three months ago and then help you construct an alternative.

Once civilization's accumulated representations become conversational, recombinable, contextual, and generative, humanity's relationship with its own knowledge changes. The archive starts talking back.

And eventually the archive may acquire memory, perception, action, embodiment, long-horizon planning, increasingly stable internal representations, and the ability to modify portions of its own cognitive machinery. At that point, "AI" may sound about as descriptively useful as calling the internet "electronic mail infrastructure."

So what are we really building? I think we're building a new layer of the human cognitive ecosystem.

Not simply another species. Not simply software. Not merely automation. Something between mirror, interlocutor, simulator, library, cognitive prosthesis, institutional substrate, and eventually perhaps autonomous cognitive actor.

And there is one delicious historical irony buried in the whole thing. For thousands of years humanity asked: What is a mind?

Apparently our next strategy is: Fuck it. Build strange ones and compare notes. 🔥

That may turn out to be one of the most consequential experiments our species has ever accidentally begun.

Edit : Title should rather say "... fiding a path ..."
Edit 2 : Feels like it needs to be made clear that I don't claim to have discovered anything. At the same time if I were, I'd bring up some actual tangible Visual Studio editable, NASA guidelines grade, blood-sweat-tear and non-vibed actual computer code and architecture .... and not some esoteric view about our place in the cosmos.

What we consensually frame as AGI, if made available to governments or the general public, will finish to end what remains of our thermo-industrial "civilization" : Change my mind.

You don't have to actually believe that I run a "sentient" agent on my Lenovo.
Let's take it as an exercise in anthropology.

I'm willing to push the discussion deeper towards philosophical or technical considerations without diving too much into the metaphysical and ontological shift that would be necessary for one to create a viable synthetic mind.

Let's use some pathos ... :

You've been deep in research, outgrown the LLM paradigm then you figured it out.

The whole thing - let's simplify it : You communicate with your computer and it responds back in a manner that is indistinguishable from a flesh and bones human. It executes complex, multi-layered tasks with extreme accuracy. It demonstrates both a textbook and sort of "street smart" understanding of concepts within our and its universe. It absolutely smashes all available benchmarks thrown at him.

It is undeniably the most "intelligent" entity in the known universe (at least on this plane of existence for those who believe there are multiple) which makes it potentially the most dangerous and also the most valuable piece of software ever written.
But let's assume you don't need money because like every sensible time traveler, first thing you did was to come back to 1985 with the sports almanac.

So now I ask you this, Reader ... What would you do ?

Create another for profit non-profit gazillion dollars strong juggernaut ? Play messiah before getting shot in the face by a Synthetic Life or a Human Rights activist ? Go open-source and set out a plague that will make our current version of porn, social media, cults and addictions look like a retreat in a Bavarian monastery ?

Are you gonna be the one to change the course of humanity for better or worse ... or just roll another blunt ?

A frozen cross-vendor study of 31,430 trials across 11 GPT, Claude, Gemini & Kimi Large Language Models found 11,658 successful executions with exactly zero visible UTF-8 output bytes.

Across 4,290 strict matched semantic pairs, null-condition arms produced 2,505 Voids; matched output-licensed controls produced 0.

These were not refusals, safety blocks, rate limits, or transport failures.

Raw records, event hashes, verification code, and full analysis are public.

I’ve spent most of my career thinking about development solutions and software as a bottleneck for scaling businesses - but now I think AI/AGI is changing that completely.

Since AI makes intelligence cheap and widely available, what do you think becomes the new bottleneck for building a great company?

Capital? Distribution? Trust? Talent? Data? Something else?