Books → experiments → solutions

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Programmer.ie turns deep technical work into books, diagnostics and working systems.

Books

Understand the machinery

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The books work through difficult subjects from first principles. The goal is not to stop at explanation: each path should lead toward something that can be built, tested or used.

21

DSPy From First Principles

Turn language-model behavior into an experimental variable, then learn when optimization is measurable, when improvement is trustworthy, and what DSPy contributes to the process.

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16

PyTorch From First Principles

Understand PyTorch from first principles — from tensor geometry and autograd to model structure, transforms, attention, debugging, performance, compilation, reproducibility, and a GPT-style model built from scratch.

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24

Browser AI From First Principles

Build browser-native AI from the capability boundary upward: local models, observability, WebMCP tools, agent security, and a user-owned browser policy engine.

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16

Hallucination From First Principles: OK

Explore why language models hallucinate, how hallucination can be measured and evaluated, where individual detection methods fail, and how evidence, verification, policy, abstention, and memory gates can be combined to build reliable systems around stochastic models.

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19 Artificial life, complex systems and computational emergence

Digital Life: From First Principles

An experimental search for life-like organization in computational systems — through emergence, causality, persistence, material turnover, hidden state and finite computation.

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11

Agents From First Principles

Build reliable AI agents by understanding the mechanisms underneath them: control loops, actions, validation, planning, state, tools, memory, search, and external verification.

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12

Models From First Principles

Learn to read modern AI models by decomposing them into smaller mechanisms, then rebuilding quality scorers, value and policy heads, recurrent reasoning systems, optimizers, and preference rankers in PyTorch.

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47

Advanced Agents From First Principles

Go beyond basic agent loops into orchestration, evaluation, reliability, multi-step reasoning, memory, and production-grade agent systems.

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60

Cellular Automata From First Principles

Explore cellular automata by building the rules, dynamics, patterns, and computational ideas from the smallest possible mechanisms.

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50

Freestyle Cognition

Think, create, research, write, and build with AI through open conversation, clear intent, structured reflection, iterative collaboration, and amplified creation.

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12

Agent Architectures: Advanced Strategies for Intelligent LLM Systems

Explore how LLM agents grow from simple conversations into reflective, tool-using, memory-enabled and multi-agent systems—and how those systems can become collaborators, companions, interfaces, and extensions of human agency.

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Working systems and solutions

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The practical destination of the work: projects, diagnostics and tools that turn the underlying ideas into something usable.

Evidence-first AI

ZeroModel

Build and inspect bounded decision systems where claims, evidence, failure boundaries and replay stay explicit.

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Ongoing work

Latest articles, experiments and research

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ZeroModel

ZeroModel: Evidence Before Ambition

ZeroModel is an attempt to compile useful parts of intelligence into identified, portable, inspectable decision artifacts — and to preserve enough evidence around those artifacts …

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AI

The Singularity Is Here

For decades, the technological singularity has been presented as a future event. At some point, an artificial intelligence would become as intelligent as a human being, improve …

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Archive

The long-form archive remains part of the library.

Earlier tutorials, experiments, research and technical writing stay available without making chronology the organizing principle of the site. The aim is not to chase every development; it is to preserve what remains useful.

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