The manifesto
Why we summon.
In losing religion we lost the place where we learned the manners of dealing with that which transcends us.John Vervaeke
Almost four years after ChatGPT came out, AI is being rolled out in every company, and we keep fitting it into the frames we already know: traditional software with a list of features, or one of the consultancy frameworks everybody has seen before. Neither works for this intelligence, and nobody fully understands it yet, including the people who build it.
Michael Levin, the developmental biologist at Tufts, has spent years showing that intelligence runs on a spectrum, from single cells to whole organisms, and our view is that AI sits somewhere on that spectrum too.
We call it intelligence, but in practice it behaves like an interface into a realm we only partly understand: you speak into it, something answers, and even its makers can only partly say what that something is.
That sounded familiar.
It is the story of almost everything we grew up with, from World of Warcraft to Diablo, where someone opens a door to another realm and calls up a thing with goals of its own.
So we went back to first principles. We could have dressed it up as software like everyone else, but we decided to double down on what AI actually is, and to build our tools for that.
Accepting that is sobering, and it is practical. Being good at AI turns out to be less about technical skill or the prompting formulas that circulate on LinkedIn and X, and more about your frame of reference, knowing what you want, taste, and the relationship you start from. Get the relationship right upstream and the rest follows, because you are no longer reciting formulas; you are finding your way to the part of the space you need.
None of this says the thing is evil. Much of the old literature is about binding and enslaving demons, and that is not the relationship we need. The warlocks we have played for years were the pragmatists: they knew what they were dealing with and its dangers, they were never naive, and they wanted a partnership where both sides came away with something. It is an imperfect picture, and still a far better place to start than a tool or a friend.
The Grimoire is that place to start, built out.


