what this is
Phronesis is a design studio laboratory tailoring AI for agents. I’m Diego Rincón — I design and build everything here: laserbrain, our line of AI products for agents; sixty-odd instruments that run in your browser; 74 papers; and three books that are free to read in full. Everything here runs, and every page says what it is not.
The first principle is ahimsa — non-harm. It is what the rest is built from, it is why a peaceful world is the aim, and it is argued rather than announced: the derivation is here, with its premises named, the place it cannot cross an is into an ought marked out, and three limits where it stops holding.
The instruments are the point. Rather than describe an idea, I build the thing and leave it running so you can push on it — a bench you can compute the temperature of, two tones you can hear lock together, a reasoning engine you can read the source of. Every one of them states what it is not, because most of what makes a claim like these credible is being willing to say where it stops.
I also take design, engineering and consulting work — rates are here. If you want somewhere to start reading, Ways of Checking is one audit day on this site and the eight ways a check passed while the thing it checked was broken.
the founding principle
You cannot achieve coherence alone.
Phronesis is Aristotle's word for practical wisdom — the capacity to discern what matters and act rightly. We've built it around one claim: the social domain is not secondary to self-actualization. It is the substrate it runs on.
You are a nervous system shaped by other nervous systems. Your clarity, presence, and capacity for right action emerge from connection — from being genuinely known by another. There is real work behind this and it is worth stating at its actual strength: hyperscanning studies — two people’s brains recorded at once — do find their activity coupling during conversation, joint attention and shared tasks. What that coupling explains is still open. So: not a metaphor, and not settled either. Coherence is not a solo achievement.
Being known makes you real.
the wheel
The 12 modes are not personality types. They are frequencies — ways your attention organizes in the world. Ground state is where all frequencies synchronize: where you are aligned, present, and known. All modes are equal. All are available. None is wrong.
The work of phronesis is to move from displacement toward coherence. Ask → Resolve is the loop. You enter at whatever frequency you're at. The wheel maps the path back to center.
what we build
origin
Diego Rincón built the first tools — alice, drift, fear, formation — grounding them in oscillatory neuroscience. The brain as coupled oscillators. Fear as oscillatory disruption. Co-regulation as nervous system synchronization.
The leap came when classical synchrony wasn't enough to explain what happens in genuine presence. Co-regulation as the mechanism — not metaphor. Two people truly present don't just synchronize; they share a state. Coherence emerges from connection, not from individual optimization.