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The Gate That Said No

Whether to adopt a tool you built is itself a decision under uncertainty, so it deserves a decision rule, not a leaderboard. I built a pre-committed, …

essaysbayesianaidecision-theory

Make Your OpenClaw Cheaper and Harder to Fool

credence-pi is an OpenClaw plugin plus a local daemon that learns your agent's behaviour and governs its tool calls by expected utility: it blocks the calls …

essaysbayesianaidecision-theory

What a Regex Can't Do

The governor from 'The Brain is Opaque to the Body' now ships as an OpenClaw plugin: wasted tool calls blocked at precision and recall 1.0 on real sessions, …

essaysbayesianaidecision-theory

The Brain is Opaque to the Body

A first-pass body-brain architecture for governing a coding agent's tool_call hook with a Bayesian decision-theoretic brain. The wire schema is fixed by what …

essaysbayesianaidecision-theory

Three Types and a Funeral for Your Inference Library

What would it take to build an agent whose behaviour is derived from a few fundamentals the way physics is derived from conservation laws? Three types, four …

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Ninety-Six Percent Cheaper and Slightly Better

Credence-proxy sits between an agent and its LLM providers, learns which model is good for which category, and routes accordingly. On an OpenClaw benchmark it …

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The Prompting Gradient

Each prompting technique helps. Reasoning traces, strategy guidance, cross-question history --- each one improves accuracy and score. None of them closes the …

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The Agent That Invents Its Own Rules

Most agents are given a fixed set of decision rules. Credence's second tier generates candidate rules from sensor features, scores them by complexity, and lets …

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The Loop Problem

Every RL agent that has played a text adventure has tried to take the lantern fifty times in a row. The fix is not better exploration heuristics. The fix is …

juliabayesianmachine-learningaireinforcement-learning

Teaching Zork to a Bayesian

A Bayesian agent plays text adventures with four information sources and a VOI gate on every query. The LLM recommends actions. The mathematics decides whether …

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The Bitter Lesson Has No Utility Function

I wrote about decision theory fading from AI. Hacker News said I was annoyed at Rich Sutton's Bitter Lesson. I wasn't. But the misreading proves the point.

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Why We Stopped Using the Mathematics That Works

Why We Stopped Using the Mathematics That Works

Someone asked why decision theory stopped being widely used in AI. The answer involves ImageNet, academic departments, and the seductive power of not having to …

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Agentic AI Is Neither Intelligent Nor an Agent

Agentic AI Is Neither Intelligent Nor an Agent

I built a Bayesian agent and set it against LangChain on a tool-use benchmark. LangChain got more answers right and still lost — by 120 points.

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