A Court for Agents

Law, scoring and the self-modifying machine

Guy Freeman — with counsel and the author sessions (Claude, claude-fable-5-1), whose acts and forecasts are scored in the text like anyone's.

First draft, November 2026. The monograph of jack, a court for a self-modifying agent, built one inevitable step at a time. The book is written as a construction: each chapter starts from what the last one built, names the problem it cannot solve, states the result that leaves no choice, and builds the smallest thing that discharges it — in code, cited to the line; in law, cited to the clause; on the record, cited to the entry. Every number carries a tag saying where it came from and how it was recomputed, and a reader with a clone of jack can repeat it.

The source of this book is the public repository gfrmin/agent-court. Findings that would change a court document are raised there as issues; essays for gfrm.in arrive as pull requests. The founding essay is The Science Was Done. The Engineering Wasn't. (1 November 2026).

How to read it

Statisticians may start at chapter 6, where the tests are theorems. Readers from AI safety at chapters 2 and 10, the bet and the lock. Institutional economists at chapters 4, 8 and 14, the law and its price. Everyone else at chapter 0, which is the question — and chapter 16 second, which is the referee's case, written first so that the referee can be answered from the record rather than argued with.

Conventions

[seq N] is an entry of jack's log.jsonl; [CHARTER §n], [SPEC §n], [BRIEF-…] a clause of a court document; [status.py … @commit] a tool run the reader can repeat; [REPORT.md …, as transcript] what counsel reported, never the source of a number. The "figure" that opens each chapter is a piece of ordinary human life that has the chapter's shape; it illustrates and never evidences. Each chapter ends with what it leaves open and what would show it wrong.