Field notes

Field Notes

Notes from building Judith — a group agent — and reading the papers that matter: the scaffold around the model.

Linear attention · Architecture conversionAugust 2026

Putting Kimi Delta Attention into a Qwen model

Gated DeltaNet is KDA with one knob held still, so the swap costs no distillation and no training tokens — verified at 0.77× the kernel-noise floor. The weight mapping, the rank-16 construction that makes it work, five traps that cost us real time, and what the conversion turns out to be worth once you have it.

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Open source · Agent securityJuly 2026

A small detector that doesn't cry wolf

We shipped the first Jataayu model — a 0.8B prompt-injection detector, Apache-2.0, on the Hub. The hard part wasn't catch-rate; it was over-defense. The data fix cut benign false positives from 82 to 6 while recall held at 0.85.

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Survey · ICML 2026July 2026

The Harness Is the Point

A cited, 45-paper survey of harness engineering at ICML 2026 — how the interesting design surface moved from the model to the runtime, the tool contract, the orchestrator, and the effect boundary.

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Building JudithJuly 2026

How Do We Make It Realize Something Went Wrong?

Why closing the self-improvement loop is so much harder than drawing it — the mechanics are easy; the rater, the part that knows a wrong answer was wrong, is the whole game.

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