Amir A
A chess engine trained from zero, creatures that learn to walk on their own, and a simulated robot arm you steer with words.
This channel is where side projects get introduced with the technical details intact. Since August 2026 it has shown off a chess engine trained from scratch, an evolution sim called Ambulo, the Armature robot-arm benchmark and Driftwatch, an API breaking-change monitor. In between come quick takes on AI models and coding tools, like how far Opus 5.5 usage limits now stretch.
- Its most-used word is "api".
- Averages 5.4 posts a week lately.
- Currently on a 9-week posting streak.
The journey.
- Feb – Mar 2026
- Aug 2026
Engines and endpoints
In August the builds step into the spotlight: wrangl v0.4.0 moved to the newest MCP protocol revision and now asks for confirmation before destructive actions. A from-scratch chess engine also landed on GitHub; its first training run took more than 6 hours on a laptop with no GPU, and it plays at roughly 900-1000 Elo.
Sources#29#30 - Sep 2026
Things that learn to move
Ambulo drops random creatures into a world where almost all of them flop, then lets a genetic algorithm breed the few that twitch forward until they sprint. Armature has an LLM plan robot-arm tasks in a constrained DSL, runs them in a deterministic MuJoCo simulation and judges success by the final world state. The goal is something like SWE-bench, but for physical AI.
Sources#42#51#52 - Sep – Oct 2026
Tool critic, API watchdog
From late September the channel turns tool critic: Zed is underrated, Java should make way for Go or C#, and Cursor's usage limits and new pricing get panned. In October, Driftwatch arrives, reading third-party API changes from the caller's side and flagging what will break.
Sources#63#65#70#77
Building now.
Driftwatch
LaunchedJust introduced in October: alerts for third-party API changes that would break your code, with a link to the exact change.
Armature
LaunchedPushing toward a shared, SWE-bench-style score for whether an AI model can control a robot arm.
- wrangl
An integration tool that generates MCP servers, with tool behavior hints derived from HTTP verbs, so AI agents know what a call will do.
Launched1 postsAug 2026– - nimzo
An AlphaZero-style chess engine built from scratch with a ResNet and MCTS, with a UCI interface and terminal/GUI clients to play against.
Launched1 postsAug 2026Visit - Ambulo
An evolution simulation where random creatures learn to walk on their own, using a genetic algorithm, per-limb neural nets and a WASM physics engine.
Launched1 postsSep 2026–
Start here.
- 01
The chess engine: AlphaZero-style, trained from zero, first on a laptop with no GPU.
Been building a chess engine from scratch - AlphaZero-style ResNet + MCTS, trained from zero (no pretrained weights, no existing engine code borrowed). Distill...
Aug 12, 2026111 views - 02
Meet Ambulo, where creatures go from flopping to sprinting with nobody teaching them.
I built a world where nothing knows how to walk. It's called Ambulo which means "I walk" in Latin A few random creatures get dropped into this world. Almost...
Sep 8, 202667 views - 03
Armature, a robot-arm benchmark that judges success by the final world state, not the model's word.
Introducing Armature - something I’ve been building. - Natural-language control of a simulated robot arm, with an honest benchmark attached for how well AI mod...
Sep 21, 202634 views - 04
Driftwatch, the newest launch, for API changes that quietly break your code.
🛰 Introducing Driftwatch - Continuous API monitoring Breaking-change alerts for the third-party APIs your code depends on: Stripe, OpenAI, GitHub, Cloudflare a...
Oct 19, 202619 views - 05
wrangl v0.4.0 and what keeping up with the MCP spec actually involves.
Hey'all wrangl v0.4.0 is out Since the last update, I've been heads-down on something most integration tools skip: actually keeping up with the MCP spec itsel...
Aug 4, 2026100 views
In their own words.
I built a world where nothing knows how to walk.
Success is a predicate over the final world state, not the model deciding it did fine.
Fresh from the channel.
If you still use antigravity I don't really trust you with my codebase
recently i remembered that i had a substack when reading @Mike_Endale substack, Almost a year ago i was talking to this random guy at an event. we were talking about tech and the somehow we started taking about peter theil (mr antichrist h...
The more this guy Elon opens his mouth, the more I see he’s an empty shell inside. I can't believe I used to look up to this guy, he was my wallpaper for years back in high school. You either die a hero or live long enough to become the v...
what is wrong with the internet today? it hasn't been working properly since morning
🛰 Introducing Driftwatch - Continuous API monitoring Breaking-change alerts for the third-party APIs your code depends on: Stripe, OpenAI, GitHub, Cloudflare and more. APIs change all the time, and the changes that break your app rarely c...
what are some cheap vps you use? any suggestions