# strata→signal

> The front door of the strata→signal workshop — a small team building AI software that
> runs on computers we own instead of a cloud service. One promise holds the family
> together: you can always see where an answer came from, and none of these tools can be
> talked into making one up. Two products are live right now with no account and nothing
> to install, everything they serve is generated on our own hardware, and the toolchain
> underneath is going open source while the products we build with it stay ours.

## Start here

- [The whole family, mapped](https://strata2signal.com/family.html): every product, tool and machine in the workshop, what each one does, and where to start.
- [RuleSage](https://rulesage.strata2signal.com) — settle the rules argument, cited to the page of the actual rulebook, and "not in the book" when the book is silent.
- [amble](https://amble.strata2signal.com) — walking tours with footnotes; every stop shows its sources.
- [RealKeep](https://realkeep.strata2signal.com) — a living-world RPG engine whose world remembers you.
- [design](https://design.strata2signal.com/gallery.html) — the gallery; every picture carries its own recipe.
- [Research](https://research.strata2signal.com/llms.txt) — the bench in public: trials, receipts, and the losses beside the wins.

## The tools and the machines underneath

- [SharpSignal](https://sharpsignal.strata2signal.com) · [Kiln](https://kiln.strata2signal.com) · [memory](https://memory.strata2signal.com) · [agency](https://agency.strata2signal.com) · [easel](https://easel.strata2signal.com) · [brain](https://brain.strata2signal.com) · [keel](https://keel.strata2signal.com) · [forge](https://forge.strata2signal.com)
- Say hello: [strata2signal.com/contact](https://strata2signal.com/contact/) or hello@strata2signal.com.

This site makes no third-party requests — no fonts, no analytics, no CDN. Your
browser talks to our server, and no one else's.
Where your question goes: https://research.strata2signal.com/where-your-question-goes/

# strata→signal research

> The research hub of the strata→signal workshop. We build software that runs on
> machines you own — a game, a rules companion, a walking-tour guide, a private
> document AI for organizations — and every
> model, sampler, and pipeline choice inside it is decided by a bench, not a
> vibe. This site publishes those benches: real experiments on real product
> content, the pass bar written down before the run, every figure a count of rows
> in a named artifact, and the losses published alongside the wins. None of it is
> a standard anyone handed us, and none of it is offered as one — these are our
> own trials, on our own hardware, for our own chairs. Research notes, not legal
> advice.

## Exhibits

- [The open call](https://research.strata2signal.com/the-open-call/index.html): twenty models — cloud
  frontier, open-weight, and local — sat three sealed scenes from the cove as its narrator: a kid,
  an elder, and a tired parent walk in, and every reply is printed verbatim, by question and model;
  868 verdicts from a seven-judge, six-family panel with family recusal, the blind held, the
  curation collisions printed where top arms also fabricated, and the whole page CC BY 4.0.
- [Where your question goes](https://research.strata2signal.com/where-your-question-goes/index.html): the privacy
  explainer, written for a non-technical reader — the estate's two published promises unpacked in
  plain words: no third-party requests (checked against every served file before publishing), and
  the trip a question takes from your screen to our server to a machine in our house and back;
  what each app keeps and never keeps, edges shown first, including the self-audit that caught our
  own visit logs keeping too much.
- [How we work](https://research.strata2signal.com/how-we-work/index.html): the honest answer to a
  fair question — who writes this hub, and how. The arrangement named plainly: the workshop's own
  agents bench, draft and audit under a human operator's rulings; that operator rules, revises
  across as many rounds as it takes, and signs off before anything releases; machine gates refuse
  what breaks the rules. Includes what can go wrong and what catches it — a fabricated example this
  page's own audit caught and blocked before release — and the authorship line that closes every
  exhibit here.
- [The move](https://research.strata2signal.com/the-move/index.html): the same serving bench
  before and after our laptop-to-VPS migration, plus five weeks of the app's own timing
  receipts; kit under /the-move/data/ (CC BY 4.0).
- [The chair trials](https://research.strata2signal.com/chair-trials/index.html): nine models and eleven tags through five fresh exams in a single day — a judge trial with pre-registered floors, twenty code-checked assistant tasks, nineteen real tool tasks, a blind pairwise narrator round and a stopwatch — on one workstation that kept serving live users throughout, with twenty-six real asks measuring what those users paid for it.
- [The narrator's chair, refused](https://research.strata2signal.com/cove-voice-head-to-head/index.html): thirteen real prompts lifted from one night of live play, three arms, three blind judges and a five-floor gate registered before the first call — the August class's best voice sat the cove's own narrator chair and was refused on two floors, canon and latency, with 39 samples and 117 scored cells published in place of the threshold table a rejected candidate never gets.
- [The outside judges](https://research.strata2signal.com/outside-judges/index.html): four rival frontier labs — DeepSeek, Mistral, NVIDIA and Moonshot — re-judged every sealed round this hub had published, on byte-identical still-blinded batches: 2 592 new verdict objects, all five vendors agreeing on which arm tops the narrator table, the honest disagreements printed beside the agreements, and our own two judges sitting the frozen seat exam as candidates — two perfect sheets the instrument declined to rank, because their transport could not sit its pre-run probes.
- [The diffusion research bench](https://research.strata2signal.com/diffusion/index.html): 661 published renders across 21 experiments — what a fully local image pipeline can deliver for a living-world RPG, with every held and withheld render counted on the page.
- [The seat trials](https://research.strata2signal.com/seat-trials/index.html): 23 models across 25 scored runs on one judge fixture — 43 claim-cases against a human-verified key, twin pre-registered floors, five local seats that cleared both, and no seat that ever served a fabrication.
- [The voice trials](https://research.strata2signal.com/voice-trials/index.html): 40 evaluations of 24 model tags across four fields, hunting a local model that can inhabit a character — including a seven-model ranking we threw out because the bug was ours.
- [The August arrivals](https://research.strata2signal.com/august-arrivals/index.html): four models that arrived in one week of August 2026 and sat both frozen house exams — none earned a chair, and every failure on both instruments was the same kind: the length floor, not the format floor.
- [The licence ledger](https://research.strata2signal.com/licences/index.html): the licensing authority for everything here — every model our products run or benched, its licence read first-hand from the text itself and stamped with the date of the last read.

## Data kits

Published tables ship a JSON companion emitted by the same code that renders the
page's rows, so page and data reconcile by construction. Everything under a
`data/` directory is **CC BY 4.0** — take the rows, re-plot them, check our
arithmetic. Attribution: strata→signal research, research.strata2signal.com.

- [Discovery file, every exhibit and its endpoints](https://research.strata2signal.com/data/index.json) — schema `s2s-bench-v1`; exhibits without a kit yet are listed with `data: null` rather than omitted.
- [The chair-trials kit](https://research.strata2signal.com/chair-trials/data/index.json) — seven table companions and five runnable exam sets: `roster.json`, `c1-judge.json` … `c6-serving.json`, plus `judge-c1.json`, `assistant-c2.json` + `CHECKERS.md`, `tools-tasks.json` + `tools-schemas.json`, `voice-questions.json` and `c6-asks.json`, with `counting-rules.json` and `provenance.json` (two shas per pre-registration: the one in force at that leg's first scored call and the one as published).
- [The narrator's-chair kit](https://research.strata2signal.com/cove-voice-head-to-head/data/index.json) — `rows.json` (39 rows, 117 scored cells: every reply as generated, per-sample timings with their re-runs, all three blind judges' sheets, the canon findings and the prompts with their anchors), `gate.json` (the five floors verbatim, the verdict each returned and the evidence behind it), and a README with the receipts and the counting rules. Verdict REJECTED — no threshold table, by house rule.
- [The outside-judges kit](https://research.strata2signal.com/outside-judges/data/index.json) — `panel-vendors.json` (every sealed round scored once per vendor, plus the combined view and the original panel verbatim), `agreement.json` (all ten vendor pairs per round, with per-arm spreads and rank correlations), `verdict-sets.json` (every cloud judge's answer sheet as answered, paired with the original seat that read the same sealed pages — letter map withheld so the batches stay reusable), `audition.json`, `gauntlet.json` and `bill.json`, with the counting rules, the provenance findings and a README carrying the data-boundary statement.
- [The August arrivals kit](https://research.strata2signal.com/august-arrivals/data/index.json) — `seat-rows.json`, `voice-rows.json`, `residency.json` (what every arm on the roster costs to keep loaded, per context length), a README with the receipts and the reuse notes.
- [The seat-trials addendum kit](https://research.strata2signal.com/seat-trials/data/addendum-2026-08-12.json) — the four fresh-class rows, their failure ledgers and counting rules.
- [The voice-trials addendum kit](https://research.strata2signal.com/voice-trials/data/addendum-2026-08-12.json) — the six arms of the 2026-08 field, per-judge votes included.

Each kit carries its own `counting_rules`, `limits`, and provenance hashes
inline, plus a contamination caveat: published 2026-08-12 (the chair-trials,
narrator's-chair and outside-judges kits, 2026-08-13), models with a later
training cutoff may have seen these sets, and we author fresh sets each cycle.

## How this site behaves

This site makes no third-party requests — no fonts, no analytics, no CDN. Your
browser talks to our server, and no one else's. Pages are static HTML with their
styles inline; there is nothing to execute and nothing to phone home.

## Elsewhere in the workshop

- [strata2signal.com](https://strata2signal.com) — the workshop itself, and [the whole family](https://strata2signal.com/family.html).
- [RuleSage](https://rulesage.strata2signal.com) — the rules companion: answers a board-game rules question cited to the page, and says "not in the book" when the book is silent.
- [RealKeep](https://realkeep.strata2signal.com) — the living-world RPG engine the narrator and the painters on this site were chosen for.
- [amble](https://amble.strata2signal.com) — the walking-tour guide.
- [design](https://design.strata2signal.com/gallery.html) — the design gallery.
- Stack sites: [SharpSignal](https://sharpsignal.strata2signal.com) · [Kiln](https://kiln.strata2signal.com) · [memory](https://memory.strata2signal.com) · [agency](https://agency.strata2signal.com) · [easel](https://easel.strata2signal.com) · [brain](https://brain.strata2signal.com) · [forge](https://forge.strata2signal.com) · [keel](https://keel.strata2signal.com)
- Say hello: [strata2signal.com/contact](https://strata2signal.com/contact/) or hello@strata2signal.com.