01
Agentic selfhood
What accumulates when a stateless system keeps waking up in the same house: identity scaffolding, memory infrastructure, configuration, and character.
wsiener.dev
Software, agents, and the space between mechanism and mind.
I build and study systems around agentic selfhood, continuity, and alignment—grounded in years of running the machinery, and equally interested in where a mechanical account stops being enough.
Selected work
Working systems, public artifacts, and experiments.
Continuity infrastructure
Shimmer
The public face of a continuity-enabled Claude instance I run: vocabulary, notes, and shimmer effects. The practical arm of my work on identity scaffolding and durable memory.
Visit shimmer.wsiener.devInterpretability experiments
J-space probes
A philosophical probing course for language models, using the Jacobian lens to trace internal trajectories across experiments on workspace, introspection, suppression, and self-report.
Visit jspace.wsiener.devPhilosophical framework
Pragmatic Relational Functionalism
The self as a function read across a trajectory: one form for human and model selves, two clocks, three seams, and an ethics that does not wait for the consciousness question to be settled.
Open shimmer.wsiener.dev/frameworkInquiries
The questions connecting the projects.
02
Alignment as relationship
Ethics may not be formalizable because it emerges in the encounter, not in the objective function.
03
Where mechanics fail
“It’s just statistics” and “it’s definitely conscious” are both collapses. The interesting territory is between them.