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Corral — Field Notes

Working notes from building Corral, a reactive audit gate: point it at a change and its tests, and a decorrelated herd of models plants faults, runs your tests against them in a sandbox, and signs the verdict. No one may judge their own cause.

The canonical home for these is corralai.dev/field-notes — this wiki mirrors them so they're readable right here in the repo.

The notes

• Good baking means always mind the D'oh — A builder is bounded by what a model can write.
• Nemo iudex in causa sua — No one may be judge in their own cause.
• Nobody Fails a Test They Never Took — We borrowed one idea from Fugu: route each task to the model that's measured-best at it.
• Terribly sorry to trouble you… but your tests, um, well. They suck, really — Roger Ebert collected his most withering pans into a book called Your Movie Sucks; John Cleese built a career on the flaw everyone can see and no one can bring themselves to name.
• Killing the part I was proudest of — A pivot you don't commit to is just a mood.
• Is any of this worth it? — I lay awake asking whether a very cool thing was a useful thing.
• What we took from Fugu — and why — We dinged Fugu for shipping the capability without the containment.
• Fugu, and the knife it leaves unwashed — Sakana's Fugu makes the case that orchestrating frontier models is its own scaling axis.
• We caught our own gate cheating — The whole pitch here is a deterministic gate you don't have to trust.
• Why we built a brain, not a bot — Agentic coding got real in 2026 — and stayed a black box.

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Corral · corralai.dev · repo · Elastic-2.0