Six chapters on the substrate agents actually run on: platform, power, closed-loop labs, catalogued services, the machine room, and the door for outsiders.
SYS: 02 / ISSUES
Agents & autonomy
in six chapters
The live field note is agents that keep going. The six chapters below are the season sitting under it.
Models can now search, synthesize, write code, and complete bounded workflows. The harder question is whether institutions can redesign fast enough to use that intelligence well.
I am mapping autonomous operations: what shipped, what binds, who can still attach. Issue 1 is the stack agents run on. Issues 2–5 are why it is hard: power, closed-loop labs, catalogued agents, machines. Issue 6 is the door for people who were not on the 278.
AmSC is live. ModCon has cards. 278 Phase I teams got the keys. July stopped being a speech. September is the stack a serious operator can actually touch — and the few remaining on-ramps for everyone else.
Read the chapter ↗AmSC · ModCon · 278 Phase I · Oak Ridge · Argonne
The binding constraint is not GPUs. It is interconnection, cooling, and firm watts. Paducah’s 1.8 GW campus. SPARK’s $1.9B transmission round. LBNL’s 2024 electricity numbers. Genesis-scale compute lives or dies on the grid.
Read the chapter ↗Watts · Interconnection · Paducah · SPARK · Savannah River
EO 14363 turns one on November 24. The 240-day robotic-lab review and the 270-day IOC were in the order. I am judging the anniversary by closed-loop experiment — overnight loops — not by model-card count.
Read the chapter ↗EO 14363 · INTERSECT · 14 robotics awards · SYNAPS-I · OPAL
Genesis treats agents as catalogued, invokable scientific services — cards, skills, auth, safety notes. Brookhaven’s MARS. Fermilab workflows on Mu2e and DUNE. If 278 teams each ship a one-off notebook, the platform fails.
Read the chapter ↗Agent cards · Genesis Skills · MARS · DE-FOA-0003612
The machine room. Frontier is still the exascale floor. Half of Lux’s 3.5 million node-hours are Genesis time; the other half is paid. Discovery is an HPE Cray GX5000 for 2028. Software only matters if the boxes stay full.
Read the chapter ↗Frontier · Lux · Discovery · AmSC + ESnet · 28 user facilities
You do not need to be one of the 278. Consortium, 24 named MOUs, user-facility peer review, Lux’s paid half, SBIR, open-model windows, genesismission-partnerships@hq.doe.gov. The 278 are a cohort, not a caste.
Read the chapter ↗Consortium · 41 orgs · 28 facilities · SBIR · Open models
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