Abdel · Applied AI & Verifiable Intelligence
Fifteen years building systems that can’t afford to fail. Now building the ones that can’t afford to lie.
Payments at bank scale. Ethereum consensus. Zero-knowledge proofs. Multiple open-source ecosystems grown from zero. A company-wide agentic transformation. Every chapter was about replacing trust with math. That work is now moving into AI safety, verifiable AI, world models, and physical AI.
World models are the next substrate. Once AI starts acting in the physical world, integrity of execution stops being optional.
Operating thesis · 2026
01 · Direction
The question I keep coming back to. How do you verify what an autonomous system actually did?
Billions of autonomous agents are coming. They’ll operate in hospitals, on roads, inside financial systems. The current stack was never designed for software that acts on its own at that scale.
The hard problem isn’t capability. It’s integrity. Once a system acts in the world, the useful question stops being what it can do and starts being what it actually did. Did the audited model run? On the claimed inputs? Inside policy? Can its behavior be replayed and attributed after the fact?
Deployment is running ahead of the verification layer. That’s the gap I work on. World-model evaluation, agent harness engineering, and cryptographic proofs of execution for autonomous systems you can actually audit.
Three things have to come together to make this work. Systems discipline from shipping under real conditions. Cryptographic guarantees from the ground up. ML depth to actually implement the models. The intersection is narrow. It’s the work I’ve spent the last decade moving toward.
02 · AI safety
AI safety
Deployment is running ahead of the verification layer. That is the gap. Cryptographic proofs, governance tooling, and agent harness engineering for systems you can actually audit.
03 · Machine learning
Machine learning
Frontier ML papers, reimplemented in Rust. If you can build it from scratch, you understand it.
04 · Tooling
Tooling
Small, sharp instruments for the way I actually work with language models and voice systems.
05 · Starknet · ZK proofs
Starknet · ZK proofs
Originated and grew the open source ecosystem around Starknet. Kakarot and Madara now operate independently with their own teams and communities.
06 · Bitcoin and Nostr
Bitcoin and Nostr
Protocol-level tooling around Bitcoin, Lightning, and Nostr. Small, surgical, open source.
07 · Shipped at scale
Before the AI turn. The work has always lived in places where mistakes don’t stay theoretical for long.
08 · Ramblings
Thinking out loud.
Essays and technical arguments. Written when I want to think clearly in public.
09 · Writing elsewhere
Older essays. Still on HackMD. Migrating slowly.
Build it so it holds. Then build it so it can prove it did.
Closing note