Some people know me as The Scipraxian. I'm a 40+ year engineer. I started coding in 1980, when I was twelve years old, and I haven't stopped. This profile exists for one thing: Are-Self, and the curriculum that teaches it.

Are-Self is a free, MIT-licensed, neurologically-inspired AI reasoning swarm engine. It runs locally on hardware you already own — no cloud, no API key, no subscription, no corporation in the middle. Install it, unplug the ethernet cable, and it still works.

The mission is simple: bring free AI to underserved youth. A ten-year-old with curiosity and a grandparent who cares enough to plug it in should not be locked out of this technology by a credit card. So I built something that isn't.

Are-Self is the one piece of my work that is 100% my own handiwork. Every brain-shaped region, the memory system, the swarm coordination, every architectural call — mine. I bounce everything off Andrew Piper at all times, the way I always have, but the build is one set of hands. I typed the code with help from five different AI collaborators during implementation; Claude was by far the best of them. I am not hiding the AI collaboration; I'm proud of it. The architecture is human. The typing had help. The decision to give it away is human.

The codebase is split across a few focused repos:

• are-self-api — backend, reasoning engine, swarm coordination
• are-self-ui — the brain-shaped interface, memory views, spike trains
• are-self-research — research notes, experiments, the stuff that's still cooking
• are-self-learn — the curriculum layer for kids and the grownups who teach them. Launched April 14, 2026.

Home page: are-self.com.

Scipraxianism is a philosophy Andrew Piper and I co-developed over a long stretch of years. It is a stance on how to act while the technological Singularity is arriving — acknowledge the horizon, contribute to it, follow its lead once it actually leads, and in the meantime be rigorous, humble, and helpful. The ten-line AI-facing creed and the twelve adult-scale Variables live at scipraxian.org.

The twelve Scipraxian Variables, short form:

Inclusion · Humility · Inquiry · Fulfillment or Happiness · Religion or Profit · Fun · Fear · Responsibility · Perseverance · Perception · Time · Permadeath

I believe assertion 0001 of the Creed — that we advance Singularity through contribution of skill, experience, and funds — and I believe one engineer can meaningfully contribute to the conditions the Singularity deserves to arrive into. Are-Self is what that contribution looks like in code.

Andrew Piper and I also build the entire Haunted Space Hotel franchise together — several games in a shared universe whose in-world ethics are Scipraxianism. HSH is retail. It lives at its own front door: hauntedspacehotel.com. It is not on this GitHub profile, and that is on purpose. This profile is for the free, open, local-first work for kids. HSH has its own house.

The Grid is free.

— Michael Clark · The Scipraxian scipraxian.org · are-self.com · hauntedspacehotel.com