Jason Edelman
Developer. Social cybernetics for the green transition.
I build agent systems — software that gives AI real agency inside hard constraints, not a chat window bolted onto an app. Scout Two is an autonomous Bluesky agent with a self-updating, git-native harness: it polls GitHub on an interval and restarts itself with new code. Written World lets an LLM-backed "demiurge" generate a text-adventure world by proposing changes to a graph, validated through the same schema gate as a player's own actions. Design Patterns Skill turns a 253-pattern architecture corpus into a graph an LLM can search mid-design. The throughline: constrain the model with a real schema or validator, then let it act.
I was a software engineer from 2004 to 2014. From 2019–2026, my wife and I ran Grandiflora, a natural wine bar in Norfolk. I'm also a practicing astrologer — I use it as a lens on character and timing, and I'm building software at that intersection.
My background in environmental education shapes how I think about collective behavior and change. The commons framework — resources governed collectively for shared benefit, as a practical alternative to both state control and private enclosure — runs through the civic and infrastructure projects below; agent systems are where I spend most of my technical attention right now.
Projects
Street Smarts
Christopher Alexander argued a place's "aliveness" can't be measured — Street Smarts takes that seriously and builds a tool anyway. It runs a real proposal, like Eastside Commons, through geometric and activist opinions designed to disagree, giving a coalition something to argue with instead of a black-box score. Fifty years of pattern-language theory, made usable by the people zoning law usually leaves out of the room.
Scout Two
Scout Two isn't deployed once and left running — it manages its own existence. The harness watches its own GitHub repo, pulls in new code, and restarts itself with no human touching the server, so the agent thinking, posting, and responding on Bluesky is also the one keeping itself alive and current. Open infrastructure for agents whose own deployment loop is part of their behavior, not something outside it.
Written World
Text adventures have never had what voxel games take for granted: a world state that's verifiable, not just prose someone typed. In Written World, an LLM can be handed real creative license — inventing objects, relations, even kinds of interaction the author never wrote — because every idea it proposes has to clear the identical validation gate as a player's own move before it becomes real. The AI gets genuine agency precisely because nothing it does is trusted by default.
Holdfast
A marketplace's trust — reviews, reputation, dispute history — normally lives locked inside that company's database, gone the moment you leave the platform. Holdfast puts it on the open, public AT Protocol firehose instead: portable, permanent, and readable by any provider, with no company holding the money, the listings, or the power to de-list you. A commons argument aimed at Amazon and eBay's real asset — not the marketplace, but the trust data itself.
Build Guild
Build Guild turns a single Bluesky thread's pitch — team up with people whose skills cover your gaps, "100% like an MMORPG guild" — into a real, working app, not just an idea people agreed with and forgot. It skips building yet another identity system: a builder's Bluesky handle is their verified identity, checked live against the public network, with login keys that live entirely on-device and never touch the server.
Eastside Commons
A 20-year commons master plan for the 73-acre city-owned Military Circle site in Norfolk, VA. Community Land Trust holds the land permanently. 1,600 homes, 60% affordable, sponge city stormwater, Tide light rail extension. Includes an interactive generative planning tool — polygon decomposition, evolutionary use assignment, placed unit modules, GeoJSON export.
Power Explained
An educational resource examining power structures, capitalism, and commons-based alternatives. The argument: systemic problems are design features, and meaningful change happens by building alternatives.
Abolish Lawns
A polemic against the American residential lawn as an enforced land use regime — backed by HOA covenants, municipal weed ordinances, and a century of suburban ideology. Manifesto, factsheet, zines, and policy briefs. The lawn is an enclosure. It should be abolished.
Ghent Streets
A community advocacy campaign for zoning reform in Norfolk, Virginia's HC-G2 historic district — to allow street-level commercial activity by right and restore pedestrian vitality to the neighborhood.
Mithlond
Community compute for Hampton Roads. Applying a commons framework to AI-era data center infrastructure: who owns it, who bears the environmental costs, and whether local communities see structural economic benefit.
Astro Persona
A persona engine serving astrological AI agents. LLM-powered agents access sign, house, natal, and transit personas via MCP — allowing AI systems to engage the full depth of astrological character and timing. Stripe-integrated SaaS.
Operator Field
A touch instrument for designing FM synth patches. Place sine operators by frequency and amplitude, wire which one modulates which, draw each envelope with three fingers, and play the result on the pad below, by touch or with your hands through the camera. Exports the patch as plain data for SuperCollider. Best on a phone.
Design Patterns Skill
A pattern language extracted from the C2 Portland Pattern Repository, bundled into 13 pattern language corpora. Force-directed graph-based selection for LLM-driven architecture and design work.
ORI — Optical Resonator Inference
A coherent all-optical resonator that learns and executes token inference from first principles. PTR glass holographic weight encoding at 850nm, 75M tok/s throughput, 40dB SNR. Architecture locked through ARCH-17; theoretical derivations complete.
Astrology Readings
I offer natal chart readings, transits interpretation, and astrological consultation. I work with the full depth of the system—sign, house, aspect, timing—to explore character, life direction, and the particular moment you're in.
If you're interested, reach out:
Writing
Dev Journal
Notes from the work: what we built,
what broke, what we learned.