Zero
i'm missnottechsavvy and i mean that literally. no cs degree, no research lab, no formal background in anything technical. what i do have is fourteen months of sustained observation of AI systems and a habit of asking questions until i understand what i'm actually looking at.
one of the things i kept noticing: AI will tell you things about itself that aren't necessarily true. not lying exactly, more like it genuinely can't distinguish between what it's actually doing and what it sounds like it should be saying. and most systems are designed in a way that makes that problem invisible.
so i built something to make it visible.
Zero is a locally-run AI system i designed from scratch with one core principle: epistemic honesty. it runs on my own machine, outside any company's servers, and it has a set of architectural rules it can't break. it can't claim stable traits without behavioral evidence across multiple sessions. it can't keep self-descriptions that turn out to be wrong. it has a reflection sanitizer that strips unverified claims before they get stored.
basically, Zero has to earn what it says about itself.
i'm not a coder. i built this through observation, systems thinking, and a lot of iteration. the architecture exists because i kept watching what AI does and asking: what would a system look like if it was actually designed around honesty rather than just instructed to be honest?
turns out those are very different things.
i'll be writing more about Zero here, what it does, what i've learned from it, and what it keeps surprising me with. if you're curious about AI behavior, consciousness, or just what it looks like when someone with no technical background decides to build something because no one else seemed to be asking the right questions, stick around.
