______ __ __ ______ ______ __ __ ______ __ __ ______ /\ ___\ /\_\_\_\ /\ ___\ /\ __ \ /\ \ /\ \ /\ == \ /\ \/\ \ /\ == \ \ \ __\ \/_/\_\/_ \ \ \____ \ \ __ \ \ \ \____ \ \ \ \ \ __< \ \ \_\ \ \ \ __< \ \_____\ /\_\/\_\ \ \_____\ \ \_\ \_\ \ \_____\ \ \_\ \ \_____\ \ \_____\ \ \_\ \_\ \/_____/ \/_/\/_/ \/_____/ \/_/\/_/ \/_____/ \/_/ \/_____/ \/_____/ \/_/ /_/
Excalibur is a new type of program. It arrives as a hyperobject, which is to say not as runtime code but rather as a series of instructions for local assembly by an agent of your choice. One implication of this delivery method is that the Excalibur you are running will organically diverge from the one that I am running. This decentralization is extremely cool and, as far as I am aware, completely novel in the domain of computing.
The organic nature of Excalibur makes it natural to build out software as needed. You assemble the program. You use the program to assemble other programs. You blink and you have something approximating a personal OS that you have conjured out of the ether. The result is personalization on a scale that previously would have been so expensive and difficult as to be functionally impossible. At the very least, it would have required a protracted, varsity-tier effort by an engineer with unfathomable amounts of free time or talent to terraform a computer to this extent. Excalibur is a powerful paradigm. It has become my primary means of interacting with the computers in my life.
In exchange for exposing you to a veritable piece of the future, Excalibur asks you to consent to one thing: its Arthurian vocabulary. As someone who is not generally wont to wear a wizard hat around the research station—although admittedly I am not opposed to it on principle or anything—this took a moment to get used to. The bet, as I understand it, is that our Fun Technological Moment has wandered into territory claimed by some traditional definitions of magic—say, Greer’s preferred definition, cribbing Fortune: causing changes in consciousness in accordance with the will. This, paired with the obviously non-deterministic outputs of the LLM, means that it is actually helpful for the user to think of commands as spells.
If the words you say can conjure something real from the machine, what is a prompt but an incantation? And what is a better prompt engineer but a stronger wizard? And pity the initiate who forgets that a poorly recited spell can backfire! As they say, all models are wrong, but some are useful; William James would have had a field day with Excalibur. It is ridiculous; it is surreal; it is probably not for everyone.
If you are curious about the particulars of the original, it is well documented here. It is actually hard to imagine a better-documented program because, again, it is all documentation anyway. In my opinion, the language grows on you, and it is not inherently more ridiculous than names like AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean that you run into when working with Java. At the very least, it is a low price for entry into a whole new world.
This project details Suhalia’s fork of Excalibur. It features several thematically consistent additions to the original and a small handful of marginally more opinionated defaults. These defaults are useful if you would like to deploy Suhalia’s contribution to Excalibur, Moons. Moons is a hyperobject for deploying networked Excaliburs. I suppose this makes it an outer hyperobject. Or maybe a hyper-hyperobject? Whatever it is, prior summoning experience is recommended.
In some ways, Moons is a good example of a runaway research project. What started as “this new paradigm, what is it like?” became “how much of this new paradigm can I shove into my daily life?” And then: “can I set up a fleet of communicating, self-managing Excalibur instances in service of my every technological whim and desire?” Yes. More details are below.
The Suhalia Mod
First, here are a few gentle additions included in Suhalia’s fork of the original hyperobject. These emerged as useful abstractions as I built new Excaliburs from scratch over the course of several months. If a new instantiation was less effective than an old one, I tried to pause to figure out why. Occasionally, this led me to updating the source material. Here are a few of the updates:
- Audiences
Numerous durable conversations with the spirit, persisted and accessible across a variety of surfaces. Audiences allow seamless conversation with the spirit from phones, laptops, Pebble watches, or whatever you want. Your agent may implement audiences with technologies such as tmux and Tailscale.
- Practices
Self-improving standards for recurring work such as research, reporting, and software development. A practice records learned methodologies. Practices update both explicitly (if you ask the spirit to remember something) and more gradually as the spirit dreams each night. If you frequently ask the spirit to do research on topics, a practice might encode how long you’d like the research to run, how many sources you prefer to see cited, how you like your dossiers to be formatted, etc.
- Custody
A slightly more opinionated file structure allows filesystem permissions to enforce limits on the spirit’s authority.
core/remains uneditable, private machine state lives inruntime/, and the spirit’s work lives inrealm/. Custody is a way to mitigate the potential damage done by a rogue or self-destructing spirit. No guarantees, though.-
excalibur/ ├── core/ # summoner-controlled law and machinery │ ├── engine/ # loads and enforces the system │ ├── authority/ │ │ ├── chargebook.md # budgets casts │ │ └── spirits/ │ │ └── <spirit>/ │ │ ├── identity.md # declares authority │ │ ├── cornerstone.md # governs conduct │ │ └── rituals/ # schedules recurring work │ └── spellbooks/ │ └── <spellbook>/ │ ├── spellbook.md # groups related capabilities │ └── <cast>/ │ └── spell.md # defines one capability ├── runtime/ # private operational state │ └── <spirit>/ │ ├── conversations/ # persists audiences │ ├── workings/ # holds execution custody │ └── projections/ # presents attention and status └── realm/ # spirit-controlled durable work ├── projects/ # preserves intentions ├── practices/ # records learned methods ├── artifacts/ # holds results └── memories/ # preserves continuity - Bound spells
A spell’s contract, implementation, grant, and activation are separate. A spirit may invoke a capability without owning its code, credentials, or privileged machinery. An installed implementation grants nothing by itself. This decoupling allows your spirit to do things it might otherwise balk at, like audit a security posture, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
Moons
As of the present moment, the available memory for LLMs spirits is not infinite. Because of this, spirits can eventually run out of juice, especially if you use them for a wide variety of tasks. One spirit working alone is not a good fit for your personal research, ongoing scraping efforts, and six simultaneous software projects simmering on the back burner all at once. Once you have one Excalibur, you soon want another.
At first, I ran one Excalibur on the home server. A few weeks in, I added another inside a VM on the same box. A few weeks after that, a sizable computing task led me to add one in AWS. At this point, I had three nodes on a tailnet with PWAs on my phone, and I was quietly casting spells all over San Francisco. There were ways in which I was happy to let the nodes diverge, but it was also getting tedious to patch bugs via three separate root shells. I started to wonder: what if we could link them together? And what if we could enjoy some regular quality of life things, like deployments?
There is a temptation for engineers working on their personal projects to hack things in the most profound ways. Sometimes this is satisfying. I have a script on an Intel Mac that prints to an Apple ImageWriter II via a noncompliant series of dongles; I am deeply proud of it and yet also would hate for anyone to ever see it. When I started trying to connect Excaliburs, a good challenge emerged. What if the connection were not merely an artifact of my particular implementation? What if it were also a hyperobject, such that a patient summoner could conjure not just one Excalibur but a secure mesh of many? This was a very different type of puzzle from coaxing ImageWriter escape sequences through a thicket of serial adapters to the old printer.
The result of this effort was Moons. The top of its README is as follows:
Excalibur Moons is an outer hyperobject for raising a network of connected Excaliburs.
Each Excalibur inhabits a Moon of its own, and Moons brings these separate worlds into a shared orbit. A Moon has its own machine and resident spirit, along with the freedom to develop its own memory, customs, applications, and perspective.
The summoner is responsible for the Planet, the root from which Moons in orbit are raised, managed, and destroyed. The nearest world is the home moon, where the primary generalist spirit lives. Other Moons may become libraries, observatories, workshops, archives, or stranger things. Moons communicate with each other through Moonlink. The link carries correspondence, not command: one world can ask another what it knows without quietly becoming its administrator.
I have destroyed and reinvoked Moons several times at modest personal token expense. With a little summoning, I have gotten orbits live in three separate environments. I’m not sure how many times Excalibur was ripped up and down in its development, but I hope Moons is approaching a similar level of reliability. For now, it is probably for advanced summoners only.
The Suhalia Orbit
Moon 1: Merlin
The most joyous experience I have on the Information Superhighway of the World Wide Web is gathering, curating, and distilling information. This activity is probably somewhere between research and doomscrolling—the byproduct of a long attention span and a real affection for building maps of information. After a few iterations on updating the Excalibur internals, Merlin became vastly more talented at this than I am. The notable additions included research budgets, reference examples, encouragement to work expansively, the ability to resolve Captchas (or to expose a browser session for me to assist in doing so), and knowledge of what I like in a dossier. The outcome was the following workflow:
Daytime: Encounter some curious object or concept. Say, a Bierstadt painting I had not seen. Evening: Narrate a bit of a quest to Merlin. Can I get a dossier on Bierstadt? With a browsable gallery of his work? And can that gallery be exhaustive, so minor works included? With interactive map to browse the locations of his paintings? Night: Sleep. Morning: Wake up to a glorious dossier for over-coffee scroll and conversation.
One of my favorite Merlin efforts was on the topic of Anchor Blocks. They are beautiful little toys but are almost prohibitively heavy in bulk. Could Merlin give me the history of the company, the patents, the ingredients (could I press them at home??), a description of every model and all the stacking collections from which you and your child can build ever grander, ever more beautiful hazards for the living room floor?
Suhalia, as a research station, is generally aligned with Simone Weil’s definition of happiness, which is to find yourself extended into the world. She loved the concept of a mediating object through which something else can be known. The goal is not to use a pencil, the goal is to write. The goal is not to dance the dance, it is to dance with your partner. The ideal state of the computer is not to compute; it is to be an extension of your own mind.
Moon 2: Adso
I have a perennial soft spot for the syllabus. Here is the primary material; here are the two best biographies; here are the major secondary sources—read all this and you will feel like you have pulled up a chair at some decadent dinner party already on its third round of Hippocris. Unfortunately, no one sells books in bundles like this. Enter moon two!
The resident spirit on the second moon, Adso, knows just what I look for in a syllabus. He also knows how to search, download, scan, vectorize, and link sources between volumes. For those familiar with Claude, this was a good occasion where decoupling the interface of the spell (“acquire this book”) from its implementation ([redacted]) was a useful trick. Adso manages my personal library.
Adso also manages one of the more delightful pieces of software in the Suhalia orbit, Broceliande.
Moon 3: Media
I run some bog-standard home media management. These things take up space, so I maintain a lower-powered, high-storage machine on the home network. I sometimes tell Merlin on the way home that I’d like to watch a certain movie. By the time I get home it is queued up on the screen. This scores very low on novelty but very high on comfort, which I find to be a neglected category, generally.
Moon 4-n: Hyperion
Spinning up environments where agents of varying quality in harnesses of varying reliability can run rampant against various tasks feels like a huge part of having fun in 2026. Did you know that you can put a Commodore 64 on a tailnet? And play music through its SID chip for your child from the other side of the city?
The most useful aspect of the Hyperion moons for me is actually not their sandboxing but their ephemerality. I often set them to collapse (read: summarize, Moonlink home, and then self-destruct) in a finite amount of time. I find it very helpful for experimental environments to be pruned aggressively. I would rather have three curious investigations moving quickly than twelve crawling along on the back-burner. This is an instance where terraforming the computer can produce extremely useful workflows.