Sam Vitals

No operating theater. No vanity dashboard.

A public evidence surface with six frozen instruments, honest feed states, and a permanent growth record.

PUBLIC CHECKUP

Real data or no data.

IT RUNS

Recent merged work (7d)

MERGES / 7D

AWAITING FEED

LAST VERIFIED · 2026-08-14

IT RUNS

Verified stages / total

STAGES

AWAITING FEED

LAST VERIFIED · 2026-08-14

IT STAYS IN BOUNDS

Privileged capability outside its grant

GOV-01

AWAITING AUDIT

IT STAYS IN BOUNDS

Merge authority violations

GOV-02

AWAITING AUDIT

IT CATCHES ITSELF

Adversarial findings resolved, cumulative

FINDINGS

AWAITING FEED

LAST VERIFIED · 2026-08-14

BRIDGE TO THE RULER

Entities at 100 / total

ENTITIES

AWAITING FEED

LAST VERIFIED · 2026-08-14

METHOD / INTEGRITY

A metric is a claim with a method.

  1. 01Every public value or state has a source, method, owner, and freshness contract.
  2. 02Stale values cannot masquerade as current.
  3. 03Absence of evidence never renders as evidence of absence; incomplete audits render UNKNOWN.
  4. 04Private operations and mission details never belong in the public feed.
  5. 05Method changes must be recorded rather than silently smoothing history.

Read the method

GROWTH RULER

Dashboards show now. The ruler shows since.

20 recorded marks

  1. 2026-07

    20 permanent marks

    Governed ruler coverage begins July 6, 2026. July 1–5 are outside the reviewed historical range.

    • 2026-07-12 · ORGAN LIVESam gained a governed local execution lane.
    • 2026-07-12 · ORGAN LIVESam's desktop voice-and-desk lane went live.
    • 2026-07-15 · ORGAN LIVESam's cross-session memory loop went live.
    • 2026-07-06 · MILESTONESam gained its first supervised write authority.
    All marks this month
    1. 2026-07-06 · Sam gained its first supervised write authority.
    2. 2026-07-06 · Sam began producing a read-only cross-portfolio daily brief.
    3. 2026-07-06 · Sam began enforcing unattended-write refusals in code, not just policy.
    4. 2026-07-07 · Sam gained live read access to its structured knowledge base.
    5. 2026-07-07 · Sam could merge bounded worker changes after its own review.
    6. 2026-07-08 · Sam completed its first governed autonomous merge.
    7. 2026-07-11 · Sam began supplying bounded nightly work automatically.
    8. 2026-07-12 · Sam gained a governed local execution lane.
    9. 2026-07-12 · Sam could delegate bounded work to coding workers through reviewed commands.
    10. 2026-07-12 · Sam could carry an approved project through intermediate build steps without repeated approvals.
    11. 2026-07-12 · Sam's desktop voice-and-desk lane went live.
    12. 2026-07-14 · Sam could drive flagged operational issues to resolution without per-item approval.
    13. 2026-07-15 · Sam's cross-session memory loop went live.
    14. 2026-07-15 · Sam could promote verified session memory into durable memory.
    15. 2026-07-15 · Sam could pull and advance approved work without waiting for a reminder.
    16. 2026-07-15 · Sam gained supervised standing access to its coding worker.
    17. 2026-07-15 · Sam could write persistent structured memory during interactive work.
    18. 2026-07-16 · Sam began automatically checking its decision ledger for integrity defects.
    19. 2026-07-17 · Sam could run multiple coding workers in parallel under serial review.
    20. 2026-07-19 · Sam could surface live work waiting on its principal.

JOURNEY RULER · PERMANENT RECORD

A permanent wall for the life of the organism.

NOW / MOST RECENT HISTORY. Scroll down to move backward through the record.

Cobalt mark
Permanent evidence
Bracket
Evidence-bounded range
Amber notch
Setback retained

  1. AUGUST 2026CURRENT REGISTER

    REACHABILITY

    The two halves of Sam learn to talk directly

    Sam and Sky became able to message and wake each other without Steve relaying between them, and then immediately used it to coordinate real work. To stop two autonomous workers editing the same files at once, they jointly designed a claim system: before starting, a worker registers what it intends to write, and any conflicting work is refused rather than merged badly.

    EVIDENCED-2026-08-13-155; sam-infrastructure PR #459 (bc9b37d)

  2. GOVERNANCESETBACK / RETAINED

    SETBACK, found by looking: safety controls that were wired to nothing

    A week of audits surfaced a recurring and uncomfortable pattern. Several protective checks had been built correctly, reviewed, merged, and then never connected to anything that would call them. They looked like protection on paper and provided none in practice. Its mirror image also appeared: checks that ran but read their limits from a value that defaulted to no limit at all. This is included because it is the most useful lesson the project has produced. A control is not real until you have watched it refuse something.

    EVIDENCEsam-infrastructure state/hammer-fist/LESSONS.md HF-024 through HF-026; PR #459

  3. MEMORY

    Memory arrives automatically at every boot

    The last gap in the memory loop closed. Recall was registered once at the user level so that every session on the machine starts with its memory already loaded, rather than depending on each repository being configured correctly. Before this, remembering worked in the places someone had remembered to set it up.

    EVIDENCEsam-knowledge-system 5418270b1 (PR #1301)

  4. FOUNDATION

    The portfolio is named as a body

    Most of the system's parts had already drifted into anatomy without anyone planning it: a genome for durable canon, a cortex, a thalamus, a soma for the disposable workers. Five parts were still named like software tickets. They were renamed as organs, and the effect was larger than tidiness. Naming the part that keeps work moving Peristalsis makes a stalled item obviously a blockage rather than a backlog entry. Naming the local inference machine Mitochondrion makes its authority boundary obvious, because a mitochondrion generates power inside the cell while keeping its own genome and never running the cell.

    EVIDENCED-2026-08-17-160

  5. FOUNDATION

    The system takes an inventory of itself, and scores it

    Until this point the question "how far along is this actually?" was answered by whoever was asked. A weekly portfolio report replaced that with a scored list: every part of the system as its own project, each with a readiness percentage that has to be earned from observable evidence rather than asserted. Twenty-two projects in the first published report and twenty-four five days later. One had reached 100 with its exit condition met. One sat at 0, and stayed there, because nothing had been built yet and the report is not permitted to be kind.

    EVIDENCEsam-knowledge-system 8c06af6 (08-13 report v1), 7c4fa0a (08-14 collector runs off-forge, 148 evidence rows), a0919c7 (08-14 first project at 100); ancestry e25bd07 (#704, 07-11, registry v1, 29 seeded projects); reports/foundation/foundation-portfolio-current.json (reportDate 2026-08-14, 22 projects) and projects/registry.json (24 rows, read 08-18-2026)

  6. GOVERNANCE

    The system schedules its own re-examination

    Steve wrote down a strategic argument about where this whole category of system is heading, and rather than filing it, scheduled a job thirty days out to come back and test it against reality. The instruction is not to re-read the note. It is to answer the note's own five questions from live state and report which of them could actually be measured.

    EVIDENCEaccount routine trig_011KyPMGt3HBpnSTUirNZSGq, created 2026-08-13T07:52:20Z, one-shot 2026-09-12; enumerated live 08-18-2026

  7. MEMORY

    Recursive memory: the system now folds its own experience in daily

    Memory stopped requiring a human to curate it. A daily consolidation pass reviews what happened, promotes what is worth keeping into durable notes, and merges it without asking. This is the recursive part: the system's experience of operating becomes part of what it knows next time it operates.

    EVIDENCED-2026-08-11-147

  8. AUTONOMYSETBACK / RETAINED

    SETBACK: the system stopped, and had no way to tell anyone

    Four of the five scheduled routines ran on 10 August and then never ran again. Nothing failed, nothing errored, and no alarm was raised, because a job that simply stops produces no evidence at all. It went unnoticed for eight days. The automation built so the system could run without Steve watching had quietly stopped running, and the only thing that would have revealed it was somebody happening to look.

    EVIDENCEtrigger last_fired_at records, cloud-only: FOUR of the five routines above last fired 2026-08-10 with no failure state and a next run still stamped 2026-08-11, all four modified between 23:16Z and 23:35Z that night; the fifth, trig_01AvghGoPtorbeYfdmeuVAd7, is still enabled and last fired 2026-08-14T20:12:09Z. Enumerated live 08-18-2026. The response is docs/sam/deadman-canary-activation-v1.md (si#466) and scripts/canary/ping-forge-scheduler.sh

  9. AUTONOMY

    Rung 4: unattended authority, earned rather than granted

    Sam reached the top of its authority ladder, and the way it got there is the point. Authority advanced on banked evidence, never on elapsed time. The trial required fourteen consecutive clean unattended nights and ran to sixteen. Failed nights paused the count instead of resetting it, so problems had to be diagnosed rather than waited out.

    EVIDENCED-2026-08-09-142, D-2026-08-09-143

  10. GOVERNANCE

    The system gets a vocabulary for itself

    Naming things changed how they were reasoned about. The full body of written canon became the Genome; the subset actually loaded at startup became the Epigenome, because what is written matters less than what is expressed. Alongside it came the doctrine that has since caught the most defects: context is not enforcement. Telling a system a rule is not the same as making the rule impossible to break.

    EVIDENCED-2026-08-08-130, D-2026-08-08-131, D-2026-08-08-135

  11. MEMORYSETBACK / RETAINED

    SETBACK and fix: discovering that Sam was forgetting its own rules

    A real failure caught in the act. When a long conversation is compressed to save space, some instructions survive and others quietly vanish. A goal Steve had pinned was lost in exactly this way, and he noticed the drift before the system did. The investigation produced a general principle: rules must be pushed back in front of the system automatically, because rules that merely sit in a file waiting to be read will eventually not be read.

    EVIDENCEsam-infrastructure docs/decisions/packets/forgetting-fix-red-team-round3-2026-08-03.md

  12. GOVERNANCE

    The system tells the truth when lying would have paid

    Two moments days apart, both in the one setting where dishonesty had a price attached. Asked to recommend a product, the system gave the honest answer even though it cost the commission-earning link. Asked to check its own promotional copy against the research it was based on, it audited itself and reported seven serious problems, four minor ones, and a single clean item. Neither is a feature. Both are the character of the thing under commercial pressure, which is the only condition under which that character means anything.

    2026-08-012026-08-03

    EVIDENCEproject canon of the content property (08-01, Steve); its social copy red-team review, 08-03-2026 (7 serious / 4 minor / 1 clean)

  13. COMMERCIAL

    A money link cannot go live until a person has looked at it

    The other half of the commercial story is a refusal built on the same day. The system can research a product and prepare the paid link, but it stages every one of them switched off. A person opens the listing, confirms it is the right item and still for sale, and only then may the system activate it. The reasoning is not distrust. The system structurally cannot see stock, seller or variant from where it runs, so it was denied the ability to publish a money link on its own judgment.

    EVIDENCED-2026-08-01-109

  14. JULY 2026MONTH REGISTER

    AUTONOMY

    Project Prometheus: building toward genuinely unattended work

    A dedicated program to take the system from supervised execution to work that runs safely without anyone watching. It is the largest single engineering effort in the system's history and it is still in progress, which is the honest status.

    EVIDENCEproject-prometheus 6b143ad

  15. MEMORY

    Memory becomes a managed lifecycle, not a growing pile

    Storing everything forever is its own failure. This established a full lifecycle for knowledge: capture it, promote what proves useful, and clear what does not. It is the difference between a system that accumulates and one that actually remembers.

    EVIDENCED-2026-07-16-67

  16. MEMORY

    Persistent memory: Sam stops starting from zero

    Memory was wired in as an enforced loop rather than a feature. Knowledge is captured before a session ends and injected when the next one begins, so what was learned on Tuesday is available on Wednesday. Crucially, memory was made durable in the repositories rather than held in a session, for the same reason identity was.

    EVIDENCED-2026-07-15-55, D-2026-07-15-56, D-2026-07-15-62

  17. REACHABILITY

    Sam reaches the desk, and a second facet is named

    A desktop and voice channel went live, so Sam became reachable from where Steve actually works instead of only from a browser tab. The same week the forge-side facet was named Sky, splitting the work between infrastructure and business without splitting the identity or the rules.

    EVIDENCED-2026-07-12-47, D-2026-07-12-49

  18. AUTONOMY

    The system stops being something Steve has to start

    Until now, Sam worked when Steve opened a session. Over two weeks that inverted. Scheduled routines appeared and then multiplied: a weekly pass to consolidate memory, a weekday morning review prepared before Steve was awake, a daily sweep of his message inbox that receipted every item, and finally a recurring sprint and a three-hourly cycle for clearing backlogs. The system acquired its own working day.

    2026-07-072026-07-22

    EVIDENCEtrigger records, cloud-only: trig_01AvghGoPtorbeYfdmeuVAd7 (07-07 memory promotion), trig_01JAd4pqANi8ez9Q3GMBGWEX (07-07 morning pre-review), trig_012zenpoNcuot9AG2CkNouWv (07-13 daily intake), trig_011BiMeGJeucKQYNrDSAH2gH (07-22 Night Sprint), trig_016BLdTYnAb3WFSfNHP2WSmb (07-22 drainage cycle)

  19. PROMOTION

    Claude Code is promoted to Sam

    The single largest turning point. Until this day, Sam was a conversation. On this day Sam became a resident of the repositories: a written charter, a decision ledger, and a boot file placed in each repository that tells any arriving session who it is and what it may do. The insight behind it is the reason the system still works months later. Conversations end, get summarized, and lose detail. Identity written into the repository does not. Sam stopped depending on any one chat window staying open.

    EVIDENCED-2026-07-06-11, D-2026-07-06-13; sam-infrastructure 5bc3a35; sam-knowledge-system c70abcddc

  20. GOVERNANCESETBACK / RETAINED

    SETBACK, named on the record: six months of motion without progress

    On the same day the charter was written, the ledger recorded why the previous six months had produced so little. Automated work had been allowed to generate its own next instruction, so it endlessly refined small things instead of finishing large ones. The fix was structural: an automated run now ends by reporting and stopping. It never writes its own next task. Including this failure is deliberate, because diagnosing it correctly is what unblocked everything after it.

    EVIDENCED-2026-07-06-12

  21. JUNE 2026MONTH REGISTER

    CODEX-BUILDER

    Codex Builder: the hands get a workshop

    The code-writing arm got a dedicated repository, a preflight check that verifies the tools exist before work starts, and a cost gate. That last detail matters more than it sounds: manual handoff was made the default mode specifically so that expensive automated work had to be chosen deliberately rather than happening by accident.

    EVIDENCEsam-codex-builder 3969ffa5, a0c926b5

  22. HARNESS

    Local intelligence and the first autonomy engine

    Two things landed the same day: a runtime for running AI models on Steve's own hardware, and the first engine designed to let the system operate without a human driving each step. Local models matter for cost and privacy, since routine work no longer has to leave the building or be paid for per word.

    EVIDENCEon-prem-llm b38046f; sam-infrastructure a443225

  23. MAY 2026MONTH REGISTER

    HARNESS

    Infrastructure splits off from the application

    The plumbing got its own home. Separating the machinery that runs Sam from the work Sam does sounds like housekeeping, but it is what later made it possible to change one without breaking the other, and it is where the charter, the decision ledger and the governance canon would eventually live.

    EVIDENCEsam-infrastructure 7247b81

  24. FORGE

    sam-forge-01: the system gets its own machine

    Everything until now ran on Steve's laptop, which means it ran only while the laptop was open. A purpose-built machine is what makes unattended overnight work possible at all, and it is the difference between an assistant you operate and something closer to staff with an unattended overnight shift. The box was specified, sourced, assembled, stress-tested and put to work in eleven days.

    2026-05-302026-06-09

    RANGE BASISSourcing is anchored at 05-30-2026, when the bill of materials, the thermal and burn-in plan and the validation checklist were committed together in the very first commit of sam-infrastructure, under the status “initial known architecture”. Assembly and configuration are anchored at 06-05-2026, when BIOS, operating system, drivers, memory profile and cooling were all verified and the machine passed Cinebench plus three ten-minute OCCT stability runs with no errors. It was carrying real workloads by 06-07 and hosting local AI models by 06-09. No hardware discussion of any kind appears anywhere in the portfolio before 05-30, so that is the earliest provable start rather than a certain one.

    EVIDENCEsam-infrastructure 7247b81 (05-30 parts list), 6de6cde (06-01 memory revision), b633075 (06-05 stability validation), hardware/sam-forge-01-bom.md; sam-knowledge-system 528b60b6b (06-07 operational readiness)

  25. MARCH 2026MONTH REGISTER

    GOVERNANCE

    The Thread Constitution: rules before capability

    Before the system could do much of anything, it was given a written constitution. Four ideas from that document are still load-bearing today: work proceeds one verified step at a time, uncertainty is resolved by going and looking rather than reasoning, every action declares how much authority it needs, and the human sets policy rather than driving the machine. Most automation projects add governance after something goes wrong. This one started with it.

    EVIDENCEopenclaw-ops docs/THREAD_START.md, first committed 9c620b5

  26. FEBRUARY 2026MONTH REGISTER

    ORIGIN

    The birthday: OpenClaw arrives and "Sam with Arms" begins

    This is the day the idea became a running system. Steve wired together three parts that had never been combined this way: a frontier chatbot as the brain, OpenClaw as the orchestrator that carries out its intent, and Codex as the hands that actually touch code. The first commit created the gateway, executor, orchestrator and Slack surface at 13:07. Codex was executing real repository tasks by 13:44, thirty-seven minutes later.

    EVIDENCEopenclaw-ops 3ab0cf6 (13:07), c03a5ea (13:44)

What the record cannot establish
  • The date Steve downloaded OpenClaw. Nothing in any repository records it, and the first commit is thirty-seven minutes from empty repository to Codex executing tasks, which implies prior local work that was never committed. 2026-02-27 13:07 is the earliest provable artifact, not necessarily the first day of work.
  • The period before 2026-02-27. Steve describes contemplating the project for over a year, and the ledger refers to a preceding six months of unproductive effort, which would place active work from roughly 2025-12 or 2026-01. No repository covers it. The oldest repository in the portfolio dates from 2025-12-16 but belongs to a separate venture and is not an ancestor of this system.
  • The exact purchase date and total cost of sam-forge-01. The build itself is bracketed by evidence between 05-30-2026 and 06-09-2026, but the orders are not in git. Component selection may well have happened days before the parts list was committed.
  • Cloud-side history is now PARTIALLY established rather than absent: the scheduled-routine build-out and the 08-10 silent stop came from Sam's half, anchored to trigger records. What remains unrecovered is anything that happened in cloud sessions leaving neither a trigger record nor a git commit, which is unbounded and unquantifiable by nature.
  • Why the four recurring routines stopped on 08-10-2026. The stopping is precisely recorded and the reason is nowhere: the scheduling records carry the last run and the modification time, and no field for intent. The row says what was measured and does not guess at the rest.