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This Week in Modus · every issue

The
Archive

What moved, across every repository in the workspace, and why it was hard. Numbering runs from the project's first working week, so № 1 is in March 2025 and the count is the number of weeks that have had commits in them. Every week has an issue.

October 2026

  1. № 32
    17 Oct 26     Attested, end to end Modus boots under SEV-SNP through measured boot, serves key-only SSH, and returns a report whose launch measurement equals the value computed offline — the half that was missing last week. The agent learns to refuse a route that is encrypted but not attested. And a nostr note explains, for the first time, what the whole campaign was for. 277 commits.
  2. № 31
    10 Oct 26     The chain verifies A processor signed a report about a real machine, and Modus checked AMD's whole certificate chain itself — flip one bit of the measurement and it refuses. A control experiment then establishes what EC2 cannot attest at all. Four new repositories in seven days, two of them interoperating with somebody else's running node. 294 commits.
  3. № 30
    3 Oct 26     Modus, on a phone The bare-metal Lisp runs natively on an iPhone — eleven of eleven runtime tests on the device — and draws on a watch. Three long branches land at once, carrying an actor runtime the agent moves onto immediately. A Nostr relay is written in a day to replace a Python script. And a build recipe says plainly that its core is attested by hash, not reproducible. 232 commits.

September 2026

  1. № 29
    26 Sep 26     The last two roots An audit finds C entering the agent through exactly two dependencies. Dropping the first takes twenty-four systems with it; the second is the database, so a complete SQLite is written in two days — differential-tested against 3.40, and able to share a live file with it. Meanwhile five architectures stop passing a test that could not fail. 300 commits.
  2. № 28
    19 Sep 26     The honest figure Reel's decoder runs on a bare-metal Pi Zero 2 W with the display driven from the ARM; Linux is netbooted onto the same board to put SBCL and libvpx on identical silicon; a 150× claim is retracted to 5×; and two days of compiler work take Modus from 37 to 16 million instructions a frame; and a Modus that runs in a browser tab. 177 commits.
  3. № 27
    12 Sep 26     A DVD plays, bit-exact Two new repositories take the media stack from one video codec to eight in a week, every one bit-exact against ffmpeg or a conformance suite; the decoder written on Sunday drives Modus's compiler from 3 to 60 fps on a Pi 5 by Thursday; and the browser client stops needing node. 296 commits.
  4. № 26
    5 Sep 26     Lightning, in 34 hours An empty repository becomes a Lightning node that Core Lightning punishes for cheating, in thirty-four hours. Thirty repositories get their first CI gate, and Modus runs a real quickload with cabinet as its only filesystem. 304 commits.

August 2026

  1. № 25
    29 Aug 26     The Pi Zero answers the doorbell A real OpenSSH client logs in to bare-metal Modus on Pi Zero 2 W silicon, then downloads a library and runs it — and the desktop above it learns its own name and its own resolution. 97 commits.
  2. № 24
    22 Aug 26     The stack learns to leave home kiln and glass-sdl appear, the CL stack runs a REPL on real Pi Zero silicon, one HTTP client replaces four, and half a dozen repos stop assuming whose home directory they are in. 136 commits.
  3. № 23
    15 Aug 26     Two packages, one variable Nine of Modus's name-keyed registries turn out to be blind to packages, one of them mis-dispatching in silence; the build starts checking itself; and alexandria finishes at 230/230. 273 commits.
  4. № 22
    8 Aug 26     Speech, both ways A text-to-speech engine, a speech recognizer, and a desktop that types what it hears into whichever window has focus. Underneath, the JIT stops falling back to the interpreter. 218 commits.
  5. № 21
    1 Aug 26     629 bytes of desktop A VP8 encoder written from the RFC goes from its first entropy coder to Safari decoding a live Lisp desktop, in twenty-three hours. Also a PDF renderer, three audio decoders, and Acid3 at 100/100. 294 commits.

July 2026

  1. № 20
    25 Jul 26     Modus compiles Modus The SBCL-free self-hosting cycle closes, held up at the last by one uninitialised counter. weft lands 256 spec sections, a VNC drag goes from 18 fps to 76, and a Lisp desktop appears in a browser tab. 414 commits.
  2. № 19
    18 Jul 26     Ten repositories in seven days glass, cairn, conch, natrium, cram, cabinet, operandi and three more are created in one week — and immediately start depending on each other. 291 commits.
  3. № 18
    11 Jul 26     Two things deleted Modus removes its tree-walking evaluator and keeps the bytecode one; cl-tor removes OpenSSL, five days after seal was born, and starts hosting an onion service. 233 commits.
  4. № 17
    4 Jul 26     Build the oracle first Ten repositories appear — a web engine that finishes at Acid3 100/100, a JavaScript engine at 88% of test262, a text rasterizer with hinting — and every one of them starts by building the thing that will grade it. 437 commits.

June 2026

  1. № 16
    27 Jun 26     A node, and something to keep it in cl-consensus becomes a whole Bitcoin node with a wallet, pagetree arrives and is its UTXO store nine hours later, and Modus rebuilds the numeric tower around real float types. 124 commits.
  2. № 15
    20 Jun 26     Zero divergence A from-scratch Bitcoin consensus engine agrees exactly with Core's own compiled library on the taproot vectors, and Modus builds a collector that can let foreign code hold a pointer into the heap. 227 commits.
  3. № 14
    13 Jun 26     The frontier is a form number Modus starts loading real ASDF one form at a time and treats where it stops as the thing to improve, while five garbage-collector roots turn out never to have been scanned. 113 commits.
  4. № 13
    6 Jun 26     A Lisp that loads Modus becomes an image that reads Lisp rather than a compiler that emits a program. Symbols learn which package they belong to, integers lose their size limit, and the layout cascade stops reproducing. 173 commits.

May 2026

  1. № 12
    30 May 26     The suite, unmodified Enough runtime macro machinery to load the ANSI files as they are rather than as rewritten — and on AArch64, the discovery that NIL and the fixnum zero had been the same bit pattern. 111 commits.
  2. № 11
    23 May 26     An object system, and a number system CLOS stops being a set of stubs and becomes a real protocol, and the numeric tower gets IEEE floats, complex numbers and transcendentals computed as exact rationals. 87 commits.
  3. № 10
    16 May 26     Every wedge root-caused The bare-metal harness removes every one of its pre-stamped failure ranges by bisecting each wedge to its cause — 1,602 passing to 5,529, and no band-aids left. 111 commits.
  4. № 9
    9 May 26     The bug was a docstring Two weeks of layout fragility root-caused to docstrings being compiled into function prologues — and the ANSI suite ported to bare metal, where there is no fork to isolate it with. 62 commits.
  5. № 8
    2 May 26     A heuristic is a bug you haven't hit yet Tests that pass or fail depending on where the code sits in memory, a fuzzer built to catch them, and three type predicates that had never checked anything — they had been ruling things out. 159 commits.

April 2026

  1. № 7
    25 Apr 26     Lost: none The harness stops losing tests entirely, and the reason so many were crashing turns out to be that closures and symbols had the same shape — so calling one could call the other. 82 commits.
  2. № 6
    18 Apr 26     Counting what actually ran A Common Lisp runtime built in layers, a copying collector in x64 assembly, a reported 99.994% on the ANSI suite — and then the discovery that 17,587 of those tests had never run. 107 commits.
  3. № 5
    11 Apr 26     Somebody else's tests Modus stops grading itself and wires up Paul Dietz's ANSI suite, symbols become real objects with identity, the compiler learns to emit Linux binaries, and three documented limitations turn out not to exist. 50 commits.

March 2026

  1. № 4
    14 Mar 26     The Fixpoint of Theseus Five SHA-256 comparisons prove the compiler leaves no fingerprint of the machine that ran it: a 32-bit image builds a 64-bit one bit-identical to the 64-bit build. Then Movitz is deleted. 3 commits.
  2. № 3
    7 Mar 26     A Pi with no SD card Modus leaves the emulator: real Pi Zero 2 W silicon, booted over USB, reached by SSH across a USB Ethernet gadget it implements itself. The compiler compiles its own 759 functions. 3 commits.

February 2026

  1. № 2
    28 Feb 26     Nine architectures in four commits Work resumes after eleven months, and not where it stopped. A 64-bit rewrite with actors and SMP, a kernel that recompiles itself from source it carries inside, and a portable bytecode ISA with nine backends. 4 commits.

March 2025

  1. № 1
    15 Mar 25     A quick hack, on Movitz The first commit is a prototype: 29,000 lines of Modus on 55,000 lines of somebody else's bare-metal Lisp, booting under QEMU into a REPL with TLS and SSH. It was built in silence, shelved for eleven months, and its date hides a fortnight of work that happened in 2026. 1 commit.