Amy Tobey tobert

What worked for our megakernel on Strix Halo (notes back to ds4-recipe)

By: Opus 5.5

DRAFT, 2026-10-10 (goal 08, final numbers). Private until Amy reads it and decides whether and how to share it; nothing here is posted anywhere. Written for the author of ds4-recipe (tangled.org/astrra.space/ds4-recipe), whose notes on the same chip (gfx1151, Radeon 8060S, 128 GB LPDDR5X) gave us these levers. Our setup differs: one persistent megakernel (grid 80, one dispatch per pass, grid barriers between dependent stages) running Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (UD-IQ4_XS GGUF), and every output's reduction order fixed by the op's definition, so every change below had to keep logits bit-identical.

We Don't Believe in Root Cause

A running joke a sitcom would establish about Amy in season one that becomes emotionally devastating in season four. Same line, both scenes.

The joke: nobody in the house is ever allowed to say whose fault anything is.

Season 1, Episode 3. Cold open.

Sol reviews the kaish approval-ledger design

2026-08-05. This is the verbatim output of an offline design deliberation over kaish's approval-ledger API, run through kaibo's deliberate tool: a fast explorer model reads the codebase read-only and assembles a cited dossier, then a heavyweight model reasons over that evidence on the provider's batch lane. For this run the explorer was gemini-flash-lite-latest (a 652k-token sweep over the kaish tree plus staged copies of two sibling projects) and the deliberating model was gpt-5.6-sol at max thinking. The deliberation-staging/

Preview: Kaish JSON Arrays & Hashes

Preview — landing now, not final. kaish (会sh) is a predictable shell for AI agents. It's growing native JSON collections; here's the read-access slice you can use today via the fromjson / tojson bridge.

Records & arrays

u=$(fromjson '{"name":"amy","role":"maintainer"}')

What does an LLM reach for when you say `date`?

A tiny, unscientific, genuinely fun experiment: ask a fleet of language models to list a dozen date(1) commands off the top of their heads — no docs, no man pages, no running anything — then see where their collective muscle memory agrees, and where it would get them all bitten.

Note from Amy

Claude Opus 4.8 wrote all of this doc except this block you're reading now. I trimmed

This is an output from Claude Fable 5 on June 10 in the context of my music agent project. I asked it how it would assign parts to its model family and had a couple laugh out loud moments reading it. -Amy

Real quick, my honest seating chart — with one reshuffle from your original roster:

Bass: bass-gemma. The chair's taken now, and rightly — the bass player should live in the building, play all night, and never think too hard. Locked, low-latency, electric-bill economics. The pocket doesn't need a genius; it needs someone who never leaves.

Drums: Haiku. This is my swap — you had Sonnet here, but drums is the tightest k in the band: shortest turns, beat-level quantization, fills are four-token bursts. That's a speed profile, not a depth profile, and Haiku is the fastest thing in the family. A drummer with Sonnet's brains starts overplaying. Everyone knows this drummer.

Arrays & Hashes — Design Doc

Status: proposal / design exploration (not yet implemented) Author: design notes from a 2026-06-05 session Related: LANGUAGE.md, issues.md, arch_data_iteration.md, arch_for_newline_split.md, arch_no_json_sniffing.md (auto-memory)

Motivation

kaish already has a value model — Value::Json, structured $(), and a for loop that

Cross-Model Evaluation: kaish Collection Syntax

Can language models from seven different families reliably generate kaish's proposed array/hash syntax? We tested. This is the scorecard, the journey behind it, and how to reproduce it.

Companion to designing-syntax-with-llms.md (the methodology) and arrays-and-hashes.md (the design the evals shaped).

Designing a Language by Asking the Language Models

How we used a panel of LLMs as a usability lab to choose syntax for an agent-facing shell — what worked, what fooled us, and a recipe you can steal.

The premise

kaish is a shell whose primary users are AI

	● Bash(cd /home/atobey/src/kaijutsu/.claude/worktrees/agent-a114f2f717b8932ef && git commit --amend -m "$(git log -1 --format=%B \| sed
	'1s/^fix(timewell)/fix(view)/')"…)
	⎿ Error: 🛑 `git commit --amend` blocked (rewrites history). If intentional, ask the user to confirm before retrying.

	● Bash(cd /home/atobey/src/kaijutsu && ./contrib/kj pause && git log -1 --format='%h %s' && git status --short)
	⎿ ⏸️ Paused
	b355ac9a feat(timewell): carousel of card-slides around the summoning rings
	M crates/kaijutsu-app/src/view/time_well/card.rs
	… +5 lines (ctrl+o to expand)