I'm Zain Dana Harper. I build software you run on your own machine: it checks what an AI model did, shows where the replies in a thread come from, checks your prose line by line, and turns a sentence into a painting, a page of type and a sound from one seed.

I am a natural philosopher and toolmaker.

I came to software after eleven years of production arboriculture. I have programmed on my own for about thirteen years and have no professional programming experience yet. I love trees, archaeology, geology, geography and paleontology. Since September 2026 I have worked as a sole proprietor from Kent, Washington. I am looking for roles in AI evaluation and developer tooling.

Knowledge has no owner, so I publish methods, data and failures openly. People who admit an honest error should have a way back. If I play for any side, it is humanity's.

python -m pip install flywheel-verify
flywheel gate

Flywheel puts any model behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint on your machine. flywheel code runs a coding agent that asks before it writes or runs anything. flywheel check-output compares the values in an answer with the source that decides them, such as a tax table or a court calendar. Every step lands on a hash-chained ledger, and a sealed result can be checked again offline with the Python standard library alone. flywheel gate seals a built-in task with no model or network and checks the seal.

The one capability comparison on record shows no measured accuracy gain: verified inference scored 9 of 10 against single-shot 8 of 10, and the 95% interval for the difference, -0.236 to +0.420, includes zero. That benchmark is retired, because its two arms shared their first attempt. Flywheel is source-available under FSL-1.1-MIT.

python -m pip install articulate-writing
articulate check README.md --profile readme --gate

Articulate reads a draft on your computer and names each writing pattern with the line it sits on: stacked hedges, marketing words, contrast framing, em dashes. A profile for each kind of writing decides which findings block, so --gate drops into CI or a pre-commit hook. It needs no model, account or key. Use it to improve writing and leave authorship to other evidence: on 183 texts of known origin it flagged 57 of 75 human texts as well as all 84 AI texts.

CMMNS, spoken "commons", is a browser extension for Chrome, Edge, Brave and Firefox. Rest the pointer on a reply on X, YouTube, Reddit, Bluesky or five other networks, and a window beside it shows where the platform places the account, signs of coordination, how the reply argues, and whether a fact-checker has reviewed the claim. Install it from the latest release with the install guide, which checks your download against a signed checksum file. Release 3.10.0 adds right-click page saving and a Python analysis layer for saved threads.

git clone https://github.com/HarperZ9/superframe && cd superframe
npm run make -- "heavy rust coral upper left, fine teal frost on the right" out/first --seed first

The Playground (THEPLAYGRND) is the engine. Superframe, its core, turns a sentence into one seeded recipe and renders it as paint, living type, line drawing, material, sound and a vibration pattern. The same words and seed give the same files byte for byte. Each render also writes a plain-language study of its parts for people and screen readers, and a JSON study for software. It needs Node 24 or newer.

The repository also holds study tools in packages/, the game Low Water in games/low-water/, and in native/ the C++23 renderer first published as raw-native.

cargo install buildlang

BuildLang is a compiled language whose function types list side effects such as file, network and C access. It builds native binaries through C and emits HLSL and GLSL shaders. Its document layer sets one source to PDF, SVG and HTML. BuildTeX, released in 1.11.0, adds a checked build: it reads its own PDF back and fails on overfull lines, missing glyphs, unembedded fonts or text out of reading order, and it refuses to start TeX or Lean. A Metamath proof verifier ships with it. The checker meant to replace Lean is still a design.

Release 1.15.0 adds experimental backends that write x86-64 executables with no outside toolchain and WebAssembly binary modules.

_{Verified 14 November 2026: release tags and merged pull requests on the GitHub API; flywheel-verify 1.9.0 and articulate-writing 0.18.0 on PyPI; buildlang 1.15.0 on crates.io; the Flywheel and Articulate figures in each README; the writing list in the site feed.}

Who Knew First records nine 2026 incidents in which an AI agent crossed a boundary. In six of them, someone outside the organization that ran the model told the public first. The series follows the questions that raises. Each piece lists its sources and the confidence of each claim. An Anthropic-built model helped compile them, and Anthropic appears in the record, so each piece marks where Anthropic is a party.

The publications page lists the essays, briefings and papers.

I take scoped work on evaluation design review, harness integration, agent safety review before an audit, and incident review. Each quote comes from the labor, time, compute and tooling the job needs. I have no paid client today and no current sponsors. The evaluation tooling is built to serve embedded evaluation at frontier AI labs, and no pilot or engagement with any lab has begun.

• Email: zaindharper@gmail.com
• Site: harperz9.github.io
• LinkedIn: zaindanaharper
• Writing feed: feed.xml

_{The art on this page is generated by scripts/profile_art.py. Motion stops when your system asks for reduced motion.}