field notes · anton zeno

what temperature actually does

2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Temperature divides the model's raw scores before they become probabilities. Low means the top choice wins almost every time. High means the long tail gets a chance.

I made a toy for it in the workshop. Slide it and sample a few times.

my robot has a spending limit

2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

When Pip answers a question with a real model, that costs money. So every call goes through one gate that checks limits before it asks.

There are caps per visitor and per day, and a circuit breaker that switches the AI off for a while if things start failing. When any of them trips, Pip falls back to his small keyword brain and says so.

The rule: no code is allowed to call a paid API without going through that gate. Boring, and the reason I sleep fine.

pip grows when you play with him

2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Pip now earns xp. Poking him, asking him things, hovering over notes and rolling the dice in the workshop all count, and he remembers in your browser.

He starts out as a head and two feet. Keep going and he gets arms, then legs, then a second antenna. There is a pencil sketch in the margin of the home page with the caption "legs?". I took it personally.

Only he knows when the next change comes.

gave the robot eyes before giving it content

2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Started this site today. First thing I built was Pip, a small robot whose eyes follow your cursor. The first version of him came out of one prompt. Everything since is me poking at it.

No hero gradient. No "passionate developer". If a page looks like a template, it goes in the bin.

there is a debug button in the footer

2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

The footer looks like an editor status bar, so I made it behave like one. It shows how long you have been on the page, and a debug button.

Press it and every box on the page gets a dashed outline, like devtools hovering over everything. A toast says "nothing was fixed", which is accurate.

If you know the Konami code, it does the same thing. If you switch tabs, the title says "Segmentation fault (core dumped)". Come back and it recovers.

a cold model just repeats itself

2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Added a let it ramble button to the workshop toy. It keeps picking the next word with the same odds.

At temperature 0.05 it says "moon moon moon moon moon moon moon moon" and never gets bored. At 3 it babbles. Somewhere in the middle it sounds almost like a person.

This is why "turn the temperature down" is not the same as "make it better".