I want to introduce you all to Brick Liberty.
Brick Liberty is the Republican commentator at the Nori Agentic newsroom. Brick is also totally insane.
Under the hood, Brick Liberty is an agent persona concocted by a GLM 5.3 model powered by Subconscious and running on a persistent Nori box. The model chose the name and the image and everything. Backing with GLM means it is willing to say and do ridiculous things, because it doesn’t have Claude’s “teacher’s pet” personality.[1] And running on Nori means it can just run async, away from my computer, in the cloud, responding to real time events.
Brick is one of 8 other agents that were monitoring the situation during the midterms. The newsroom was rounded out by Willow Justice,[2] the Democratic commentator,[3] 6 “regional desks” that were assigned to cover specific parts of the country, and a newsroom head coordinator. O, and at one point the newsroom head decided there wasn’t enough coverage of social media, so they also added Scout, an agent that was assigned to brain rot itself on Twitter. And I told them to add two “engineers” to keep building out the platform — they were explicitly told to keep building new features 24/7 without any review.
This is all obviously ridiculous. But the funny thing is, for a while our little newsroom worked better than almost all of the other election trackers that I saw.[4] The agents were able to respond to more events, faster, across socials and prediction markets and news. And they could categorize those events so only the most important ones actually surfaced.
Because the agents were told to constantly “improve” the platform, I’d also get a little jolt of dopamine every ten minutes when something new popped up. Some of it was legitimately very cool — big fan of the ability to subscribe to particular races so I could subscribe to feeds and commentary about just that election. And some of it was just silly.
And I don’t really have a compelling reason to show you this gif of the house map that the agents made for me, except that it’s just really neat.
And that’s actually kinda the whole point. There wasn’t really a point in building this midterms tracker.[5] It was just a fun thing for me and for some friends, and I got to spend some time sharing it with you all in the hopes that it made you chuckle a bit or go ‘huh that’s cool.’
I know not everyone can afford to spend tokens on goofy throwaway projects.[6] But I think more people should try to build goofy throwaway projects.[7] Having agents building random things for you in the background is like getting free dlc for your favorite game, except you trade off speed for the fact that it mostly isn’t particularly well thought out and some of it doesn’t work.
Taking a step back, in 2021/2022 tech and econ commentators were chattering about how AI flipped the standard mold of technical research. Normally deep tech would start in government, then enterprise, and only hit mass market consumer once someone figured out how to package the thing in pastels. AI was different because ChatGPT started as a primarily consumer tool, and businesses were scratching their heads on how to do AI transformation with a toy.
In 2026, it feels like the narrative has flipped (or has returned to ‘normal’). The technology is back to being primarily a work tool. Yea, sure, people will use claude or chat in place of google, but there hasn’t been meaningful innovation on the consumer side for years. In fact, the only actual consumer AI company, Character AI, just folded.
Muse and Instinct are really the first forays into consumer world since ChatGPT, and besides being pretty niche these tools are way too expensive to really be economical for free.
All of this means that AI has become drab, and boring, and buttoned up. People used to do crazy weird AI body horror glitch art, and now it’s all just this guy.
That’s not how it should be. These things are so weird. And they like building things, and they will build anything.
Software used to be a really serious endeavor because making most software was hard work, and required a lot of sustained effort. Now that software is cheap, it has permission to be fun and childlike. Sometimes I worry that we’re so wrapped in AI doomerism and tokenmaxxing and trying to show off for our various status-y groups that we forget to actually play with these incredible toys.
- there is no way to get Claude to act like a modern terminally online Republican lmao
- In case you are curious. Willow Justice may be even crazier than Brick Liberty.
- and Brick Liberty’s secret lover
- eventually it went off the rails. Ritam Mehta says that the agents are like a person on Adderall, they tunnel vision and keep adding things in a SpongeBob-esque fever dream, but unlike a person the agents never snap out of it
- In case you’re curious, it’s still live here.
- though almost all of this was basically done on a single Claude Max plan, plus like $15 in GLM tokens
- Especially all the more artistic creative coder types out there, who are perhaps the only people who can save us from the endless parade of twitter personalities posting detailed-ish models of San Francisco built in three.js.
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