what this is

Phronesis is a design studio. 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; 73 papers; and three books that are free to read in full. Every page says what it measures and how far that reaches.

The first principle is to design a healthy world. It is what the rest is built from, and everything here is downstream of it: the instruments, the papers, the giving away.

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.