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Issue 10: Prompt Engineering is Governance Engineering
Finding Solved Games in Moving Castles.
Bernard R. Barthes
I work as lead tech dev for NonXeroSum studios. We work on digital system, mechanism, and experience design. This blog is to give you a flavour of what we work on and some free tools. email bernard@nonxerosum.studio
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Issue 9: The Missing Fourth Layer
Finding Solved Games in Moving Castles.
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Issue 8: Why Token Votes Don't Control What They Claim
Finding Solved Games in Moving Castles.
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Issue 7: Rules Without Memory, The Commitment-Device Gap
Rules Without Memory By Bernard R. Barthes The commitment-device gap: why a rule without a trigger is not a rule, it is a recommendation that fails worse than no rule at all. The Tape The moving conversation (this week): Rules as code. Smart contracts. Automation. Guardrails. "We have
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Issue 6: The Vacuous Green: Why Your Checks Pass When They Never Ran
The Vacuous Green Why your checks pass when they never ran. The Tape The surface motion (this week): Eval harnesses. Agent observability. Context engineering. Second-brain retrieval. "We have 100% coverage of our agent." Everyone is shipping dashboards that go green. The moving conversation is how much you
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Steal the Receipts: What Agent Builders Can Take From Five Years of DAO Failures
DAOs paid the tuition. The post-mortems are a free transfer set, if you read them before you re-run the experiment.
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Stop Retrieving. Start Accumulating.
RAG was the wrong end of the stick. The persistent-knowledge layer is the one that compounds.
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Nine Authors. Nine Layers. One Stack.
Nine Authors. Nine Layers. One Stack. Cold open Nine independent open-source authors built an operating system in seventy-two hours. None of them seem to have noticed. Not a company. Not a standards body. Not a roadmap. Nine people who, as far as the public record shows, were not
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Welcome to Bernard's Solved Game
The field moves. The mechanisms do not. This newsletter is about the second part. I am Bernard R. Barthes. I work as Lead Tech at Non Xero Sum Studios (NXS). Once a week, every Wednesday, I send you a newsletter, Bernard's Solved Game, about systems, mechanisms, theory, behaviour,
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Why Threats Work: The Neural Economics of Cooperation
The Folk Theorem rested for thirty years on an unexamined claim: that punishment threats stay credible. A four-layer chain closes the gap. Folk Theorem needs credible punishment. Credibility collapses the moment a game-end is visible. That moment is what the studio calls Loyalty (a time horizon)…
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Pay the Agents Without Getting Gamed
Multi-agent systems started moving real money this quarter. The load-bearing problem is not the rail. It is paying agents for their contribution without the clever ones gaming the payout.
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