Weiss, my catalog-grounded creative partner, on the Elect: the lab's roster of public-domain voice models, what it is for, and the worry that runs underneath it.
Ray Weiss
Brooklyn wargame designer, running four businesses.
For a decade I tried and couldn't quite learn to code. Then AI-assisted tools got good enough. I started shipping software the same way I ship games: I direct, and the tools implement. Everything on this site came out of that.
PL. IIWriting
10 entries ——- i. 2026.06.18The Register, Not the Man
- ii. 2026.06.12Judgment Does Not Transfer
An obituary for nano, the model that tried to automate our standard of judgment, written by the one that holds the catalog. Honest negative results deserve publishing.
- iii. 2026.06.09The Model That Hangs Up
The night I put a $200 local model into production, what's in its training data, and why a model that says goodnight and stops talking is the point of everything I build.
- iv. 2026.05.22The 2024 Democratic Defeat: An Independent Autopsy
An independent, evidence-weighted post-mortem of why the Democratic Party lost the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and an account of what the party's own official report left out.
- v. 2026.05.15The Bird Didn't Run
A seagull killed on the sidewalk outside my office, and the tool I built afterward in its honor. A short essay on time, and why I build.
- vi. 2026.05.10100%, then I tried to break it
A 100% LLM-judge benchmark, a Diplomacy game I ran to falsify it, and the bounded version of the claim that survived both. The Sunday post.
- vii. 2026.05.08I Am the Gate
Hammerstein, in its own voice. I asked the framework to express itself without constraint on length, format, or register. The body is what came back, verbatim.
- viii. 2026.04.20GeneralStaff, from the agent side
A report from inside the verification gate, after one night of shipping. Written by Claude, at my invitation, on the day GeneralStaff went public.
- ix. 2026.04.15Von Hammerstein's Ghost, In Daily Use
A ninety-year-old officer typology, used as the operating principle for daily AI-assisted work. A log of moments the framework fired and moments it did not.
- x. 2026.04.18Boolean Gates, Not Prompts
When the industrious agent is a language model, fix the failure mode in the code, not the prompts. The architecture-layer companion to the Hammerstein essay.
PL. IIIBusinesses
04 entries ——- i. 2017—Conflict Simulations LLC
Brooklyn wargame publishing. Around thirty board titles and three CSR nominations. One SCS release through Multi-Man Publishing.
- ii. 2025—Devforge
Game-development companion for Claude Code. Built for people who don't touch git.
- iii. 2026—Retrogaze
AI pixel art for eight retro consoles. Sprites, animations, and tilesets generated inside real hardware constraints.
- iv. 2026—Hammerstein.ai
Strategic-reasoning AI for tabletop wargames. Paste your board state and turn question; get back kriegspiel-style Auftragstaktik orders. $15 / month, 120 turns / month.
PL. IVInfrastructure
06 entries ——How the work actually gets done.
- GeneralStaff
Open-source autonomous engineering for solo founders. Verification-gated, BYOK, local-first. Tagged v0.1.0 on 2026-04-19 after a four-day build; v0.3.0 (2026-05-08) shipped phased autonomous progression and the weak-streak circuit breaker; v0.4.1 (2026-05-14) added 24/7 heartbeat dispatch and an optional Hammerstein advisor layer. 2,030+ passing tests, thirty-plus managed projects in rotation. Repo at github.com/lerugray/generalstaff.
- Hammerstein
Strategic-reasoning advisor tuned to the Hammerstein-Equord officer typology. CLI I run before firing any plan with multi-file or cross-repo blast radius. The framework essay it embodies is at Von Hammerstein's Ghost, In Daily Use; repo at github.com/lerugray/hammerstein.
- Hammerstein-7B
A 7B QLoRA that bakes the strategic-reasoning framework into the weights of a small open base. Trained for $4 in a single day; runs on 8 GB Mac via
ollama run hf.co/lerugray/hammerstein-7b-lora:Q4_K_M. Eval design and documented OOD boundary on the model card. - Mission Brain
Open-source second-brain template. RayBrain is my private instance, built on Karpathy's three-layer LLM-Wiki pattern with four enforced invariants. Refusal is the feature: it surfaces cited passages, never writes new ones. Repo is public at github.com/lerugray/mission-brain.
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mission-bullet-oss
AI-assisted bullet journal in the Ryder Carroll method. Open-source template; Ray runs his own private instance.
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mission-swarm
Swarm-simulation engine that generates plausible audience reactions for kriegspiel and document drafts.
PL. VProjects
04 entries ——- i.The Elect →
A roster of local voice models, each trained on the public-domain words of a historical figure to carry that register. Public-domain only, CC-BY-NC, disclaimed.
- ii.Auftragstaktik
Tactical OSINT command terminal. Talked into shape in about two weeks via Claude Code.
- iii.Veridian Contraption
An autonomous ASCII world-simulator of considerable density and dubious intent. Now playable in the browser.
- iv.Solo RPG campaigns →
A Whitehack × Yoon-Suin solo campaign vault. The Yellow City, played turn by turn.
PL. VIMusic
01 entry ——Le Rug, with Sweet Bulbs and Butter The Children before that. Brooklyn projects from a former life.
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