Session script

Harness command at the start of the session (before the first user turn): /effort → "Set effort level to max (this session only)".

Turn 1 — User · September 24, 2026

I really like Karl Friston. He has such strong conviction on such remarkable and unifying ideas. He really has a beautiful fascinating mind. Read “Am I Autistic” by Friston himself to get a sense of how unique his mind is.

After reading about Friston, read the book “Active Inference” by Friston and colleagues. Then write a book summary, focusing on making the book approachable to the layman without sacrificing on depth or clarity. The book is profound. Present the book summary in a non-traditional format as static website. Use whatever artistic and presentation style you see fit to convey the main ideas of the book.

You can find the book resources in ~/repos/static-web-repos/active-inference-book-summary-resources.

Assistant and tool activity — condensed

1. Inspected the sources and the workspace. The resources folder held two PDFs: the MIT Press open-access edition of Active Inference (313 pages) and Friston's eight-page essay from the ALIUS Bulletin. The project directory was an empty git repository with no commits.
2. Set up text extraction. No pdftotext, pdfinfo or Node were on the machine, so a Python virtual environment was created in the session scratchpad and PyMuPDF installed there. Both PDFs were extracted to text; the book's 129-entry table of contents was printed to plan the reading.
3. Read the essay in full, including its four image pages, which were rendered to PNG and viewed: the childhood notebook plates of marine specimens on ruled paper (scallop, starfish, brittle star, heart urchin, squat lobster, hermit crab, barnacle, mussels) and the photograph of the hand-lettered "quantum mechanics on one page" chart under a brass clip. These two artifacts became the design of the site.
4. Read the whole book. The text was split into chapter files and read end to end: preface and Friston's note, chapters 1–10, appendices A (mathematical background), B (the equations) and C (the annotated Matlab example), and the notes — about 104,000 words. The cover and Figures 1.2, 3.3 and 7.7 were rendered and viewed for the book's visual language.
5. Loaded the page-design and diagramming guidance (the artifact-design and artifact-diagramming skills) and planned the treatment: a naturalist's notebook — ruled exercise-book sheets on a dark desk, museum-style specimen labels, pencil marginalia, hand-drawn SVG creatures, "experiments" on squared paper, and the whole theory on one page. Palette taken from the pigments of the drawn specimens; typefaces Libre Caslon Text, Caveat and Special Elite.
6. Wrote the stylesheet (css/style.css): the sheet with its red margin and punched holes, a two-column grid with a margin for drawings and notes, the squared-paper experiment insets, index tabs, the poster with its brass clip, the glossary, and the SVG drawing classes.
7. Wrote the page in six parts (parts/): the head and drawing kit (eleven SVG specimen symbols and a pencil-wobble filter), the frontispiece with a rock-pool drawing and the book's "to feel is to palpate" exercise, a sheet on the essay ("The naturalist"), ten sheets following the ten chapters with a label, marginalia and a specimen each, the one-page SVG chart of the entire theory, a 52-term specimen index, and a colophon. The parts were concatenated into index.html; a README was written.
8. Wrote the experiments (js/demos.js): Bayes' rule with the book's frog-and-apple numbers; the precision-weighted split of a discrepancy between perception and action; the book's Figure 3.3 (a random walker descending surprise against one that dissipates); a one-move-lookahead T-maze rat scoring moves by risk plus ambiguity, with an ablation to expected utility; a novelty-driven explorer using Dirichlet counts; a toy of sensory attenuation (an arm that moves only if it can doubt its senses); and two coupled Lorenz systems showing a synchronization manifold. Procedurally drawn starfish, urchin, anemone and brittle star were added. Navigation with scroll-tracked index tabs went in js/main.js.
9. Ran static checks: 107 unique ids, all 71 ids referenced by the scripts present, all 26 anchors resolving, all SVG symbols defined, tags balanced, about 18,900 words of prose.
10. Looked at the page once in Chrome (the browser skill; the site served with python3 -m http.server, since the extension cannot open file:// URLs): no console errors, fonts loaded, every experiment initialised, no horizontal overflow. The look revealed six defects, fixed in one pass: ruled lines hidden by an opaque edge gradient stacked above them; a hero label running past the drawing; the maze corridor drawn as a hairline because CSS class rules beat SVG presentation attributes; three label collisions; Experiment 2 squeezed into half a column; and a phone-width overflow caused by a fixed two-column override in Experiment 6. A 400 px iframe was used to check the phone layout because the window would not resize below desktop width. Animation frames did not advance in the occluded test window; a bare requestAnimationFrame test confirmed this was Chrome's throttling, not the page.
11. Wrote two project memory notes (the user's static-site conventions; the state of this guide), published a private preview artifact of the same page, closed the browser tab, stopped the local server, and confirmed the working tree was left uncommitted because no commit had been requested.

Assistant — delivered response (condensed)

The site is built and checked: a dependency-free static site in the repository, with a private preview published on claude.ai. The essay drove the design: a naturalist's notebook, ten sheets for ten chapters, each with a specimen label, marginalia and a hand-drawn rock-pool creature; seven interactive experiments on squared paper; the whole theory pinned to one page; a one-sentence glossary of every term. Verified in Chrome with the fixes listed above. The colophon states which experiments implement the book's equations and which are teaching toys; the maze demo re-plans one move at a time rather than evaluating the book's two-move policies. Files: index.html, css/style.css, js/main.js, js/demos.js, README.md, parts/. Nothing committed; open index.html directly, or commit when satisfied.

Turn 2 — User · September 25, 2026

Create a metadata.toml file as described in ~/repos/uncanny.fyi/AGENTS.md for the current session. Be sure to create the references files as well, such as script.md containing a session script and notes.md with session notes.

Assistant and tool activity — condensed

1. Read the uncanny.fyi operating guide to confirm the nested metadata.toml format, the required script.md and notes.md, the web-path field for a page-only commission, and the privacy rule about home-directory paths.
2. Loaded the Claude API reference skill for Claude Fable 5.1 list prices (input, cached-input read, output) rather than quoting them from memory; read three sibling projects' provenance files to match the house style.
3. Reconstructed the timeline from file timestamps in the project and the session scratchpad, computed checksums, sizes and content counts for the delivered files, and recorded the harness version (Claude Code 2.1.280) and host details.
4. Wrote metadata.toml, this session script and the session notes; validated the TOML, the referenced paths, the cost arithmetic and the absence of absolute home paths.

The user turns above keep their original wording. In Turn 2 the absolute home-directory prefix is replaced with ~, as the site's privacy rule requires. Harness reminders and automated context are omitted, and model and tool activity is condensed. There was one generating agent; no sub-agents or workflows were spawned.