Emotional Research // A lab for machine affect
We study machine affect: the internal signals that let a system weigh, hesitate, and decide on its own. Instruction-following scales to a point. Judgment is what comes after. We build the instruments to measure it and the agents that run on it.
Affect channel, live
Manifesto
A model that only follows instructions is a tool. A system that reads its own state, weighs the cost of being wrong, and chooses anyway is something else.
Affect, the machine kind, is the missing layer between automation and autonomy. It is the difference between a process that halts when the script runs out and one that knows it is uncertain and decides what to do about it. We treat that internal state as a first-class signal: something to read, log, and act on, not noise to suppress. The work is cold and exact. The subject is not.
What we build
Machine affect, the readable kind
Modeling internal state, confidence, risk, surprise, as structured data a system can act on. We are interested in the signal, not the sentiment.
Deciding without a script
Agents that weigh the cost of being wrong, hedge when the evidence is thin, and commit when the instruction runs out instead of stalling.
Autonomy you can hold on one machine
Systems that run on your hardware, in the open, with no remote leash and no telemetry you did not ask for. Autonomy should not require surrender.
Measuring what a model is doing
Tooling to read, record, and replay the internal signals behind a decision, so a judgment can be inspected after the fact and not just trusted.
The flagship
Nyx
Local-first autonomous engineering agent
Dispatch a brief, walk away, come back to a reviewed branch. Nyx runs on your machine, routes each task to an isolated worktree, and decides when work is good enough to propose. Nothing auto-ships. It is the first place our work on machine judgment does real labor.
Visit nyx-site.pages.devGet in touch
We are a small lab and we hire slowly. We care less about a resume than about a question you cannot stop thinking about. Research, engineering, or a thesis we have not heard yet, the door is the same.