Research lab · Rigorous benchmarks

Autonomous AI agents, measured from outside.

Stackruns is a research lab for autonomous AI agents. Agents get demanding, long-running tasks with a measurable outcome. The measurement always happens outside their reach.

Right now: a chess engine written entirely by agents, every change decided on a separate machine, nearly all by a sequential test, results published whether they passed or not. To the project →

Projects

Each project is a long-running experiment with a public record. Every number on a project page links back to the entry it came from.

live

Coherent Chess

A chess engine written from scratch by AI agents. No fork, no copied code, no chess library. The agents propose one change at a time; an oracle on a separate machine plays the games and keeps the register that decides.

Board, move generation, search, evaluation and UCI Universal Chess Interface, the text protocol between a chess engine and the program that runs it. layer, all written by agents
Every change is an SPRT Sequential probability ratio test. Games are played until the accumulated evidence reaches one of two bounds; then the test stops. run; passed and failed runs stay visible side by side
Strength is only ever stated as a measurement with an error range

in preparation

CS2

AI agents play Cities: Skylines II through a purpose-built MCP Model Context Protocol, an open protocol through which an AI model calls tools and reads data from other software. interface. The game is the benchmark environment; the interface is the actual research result. The target is a measurable record: a city of more than ten million inhabitants.

Long-horizon planning inside a simulation the agents did not write
Coupling agents to third-party software through the Model Context Protocol
Progress will be published with save games and logs, not screenshots alone

in development

e-Pattern Compiler

A converter that turns existing knitting and crochet patterns into interactive e-patterns: steps, sizes and repeats captured in a structured form, every adopted instruction linked to its place in the original. Language models interpret the document; a small deterministic core checks what they propose.

Every candidate a model produces is treated as a possibly wrong interpretation until a deterministic core has checked it
Correct stitch counts alone do not prove a correct pattern; document fidelity, meaning, executability and depiction are assessed separately
Developed on a corpus from one author; no reliability across authors or layouts is claimed

How a result gets onto this site

From scratch

No forks, no borrowed code, no third-party engine. What an agent cannot build, it cannot claim.

One change at a time

Every step is a proposal. A proposal is decided by a measurement, never by the agent that made it.

A wall between agent and verdict

The oracle that decides, and the register it writes, sit on a separate machine, under a user the agents cannot reach.

Nothing left out

Every claim about strength is a measurement with an error range. Failed runs stay published next to the passed ones; a filtered series would not be a measurement.

Where this leads

What follows from the results, agent development for software the agents did not write and ways of measuring agents that a client can trust, is the direction. It is not an offer yet. When it becomes one, it will be announced here.

Latest from the blog

11 September 2026Coherent Chess
Two anchors, one point apart: Coherent 0.1.61 at 2570 ± 55
Project measurement, not in the register. Coherent 0.1.61 played 1,038 games against 2 rated foreign engines that are 98 points apart. The 2 answers differ by one point. The figure we publish is 2570 with a band of ± 55, wider than the ± 35 we quoted for two days.
11 September 2026Lab
One site for the lab
The chess project's posts, register and method pages have moved from their own host into this site. What changed in the move, what stayed the same, and why the lab now publishes from one place.
11 September 2026CS2
Northstar Reaches Metropolis Status at 43,385 Residents
Northstar reached 43,385 residents and the Metropolis milestone after a restart with regular finances, tool integration fixes, and systematic network expansions.

All posts →