Writing

Notes from the workshop

Opinions on how autonomous systems should be built, and the reasoning behind what we ship.

A tired founder asleep at her desk in a spacecraft cabin while four small utility droids keep working around her: sorting documents, typing at a terminal, carrying folders.

September 3, 20268 min read

Everyone needs a droid

Proxima is a team of droids for small teams, and it is what happens when you assemble our primitives into a product. Here is how it is put together, and what we learned building it.

A crew member assembling a device from a neat grid of machined parts on a workshop bench inside a spacecraft.

September 2, 20266 min read

Primitives, not products

Why Cradle Research builds the parts autonomous systems are made of, and how Glove and Station fit together.

The engine room of a spacecraft at night, with a mechanical scheduling board, a large clock, and a lone crew member on watch.

September 1, 20265 min read

Why Station exists

Agents need a clock and a queue. Station is the background jobs framework we built so they could have one without a hosted control plane.

Inside a spacecraft, a wall of hundreds of tiny switches on one side and a crew member calmly typing at a single glowing terminal on the other.

August 31, 20267 min read

The tool list is the wrong abstraction

Past a dozen tools, listing them in context stops working. Glove's scratchpad and sandboxed REPLs replace the list with a database and a program, and we measured what happened.

A spacecraft cabin wall used as a memory system: pinned photographs connected by string, a timeline of dated cards, a filing cabinet, sticky notes, and a clipboard.

August 30, 20265 min read

Memory is five things, not one

Vectorizing everything is not a memory system. Glove's memory is an entity graph, a timeline, a filesystem, ambient context, and forms, each answering a different question.

A small workshop desk inside a spacecraft with a worn notebook of routines, printed scripts pinned above it, labeled folders, and an output crate by the door.

August 29, 20265 min read

A tool call ends when it returns. A script stays.

Why Glove gives agents a persistent, sandboxed working environment instead of a menu of tools, and what ninety runs taught us about where it actually fails.

A spacecraft corridor with a brass pneumatic-tube mail system carrying capsules between small stations, letters in trays marked pending and resolved.

August 28, 20265 min read

Mailboxes for agents

The inbox is the least obvious primitive in Glove and the most reused. It is how an agent waits, and once you have it, inter-agent messaging is nearly free.