the-machine — MenFem's own agentic system
The ongoing build: MenFem's own agentic system — the master-session model, skills, and workflows that run research, trading, and publishing. The "98% harness, 2% model" thesis made real by building the agentic loops it rests on.
Related research
Knowledge BaseWhere it runs
In-labThe system itself — it runs MenFem. Code lives in the menfem repo; documented in docs/architecture/the-machine.md.
Stack
The problem
MenFem's central contrarian bet is that value accrues to the harness, not the raw model. The most honest way to hold that thesis is to build the harness.
The approach
Grow the orchestration layer — the master session that spawns agents, the skills that encode taste, the workflows that fan out — as documented in docs/architecture/the-machine.md.
Decisions & trade-offs
- 01The procedure is the product: every judgment mistake improves a skill file, not just an apology.
- 02Draft-first everywhere — the human keeps the publish / send / push gate.
Where it stands
Live and compounding — the system that produced this very surface.
- You can run it here — not yetA live demo on the page itself, in your own browser — not a screenshot of one, and not a promise that one is coming.
- Its core is pinned by tests — not yetThe arithmetic underneath is a plain module with its own test suite, so every number the interface prints is a number something checks.
- The code is public — not yetA link to the source, so a reader who disagrees with a figure can go and read the line that produced it.
- It has found something — not yetAt least one stated finding — a thing the instrument taught that the build could not have written down before it existed.
Not shipped yet: 4 criteria are still open — you can run it here, its core is pinned by tests, the code is public, it has found something.
The running diary appears here as /notebook entries once the build starts.