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Awesome Agentic Patterns
A curated catalogue of agentic AI patterns — real‑world tricks, workflows, and mini‑architectures that help autonomous or semi‑autonomous AI agents get useful work done in production.
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If you gaze into an abyss...
Wasn't it you who recently, in a moment of clarity, concluded that wading into the deep end of the conspiratorial undercurrent was detrimental to one's spiritual health? That consuming "the news" was a waste of time? And yet here we are again - with a fever. Stay sane my friend and turn it all off and focus on making yourself a better person.
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Aphorism 146)
"In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time." - Robert Anton Wilson
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The Great Smokey Dragon
John Archibald Wheeler’s "great smoky dragon" is a metaphor for quantum mechanics' fundamental indefiniteness, describing a particle that is well-defined only at its source (tail) and detection point (mouth). The middle (the body) is a nebulous, unobservable superposition. This metaphor is frequently used to discuss quantum weirdness, entanglement, and the observer-dependent nature of reality.
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Time is only a veil: Translation of the first page of The Triangular Book of St. Germain and AI Interpretation of second page.
Doctrine of Being
From the universal light all things proceed.
The enlightened man does not seek vulgar gold,
but the key that opens nature.
This secret fire, unknown to the profane,
is contained in all matter
and reveals itself to one who knows how to unite
the fixed and the volatile.
Time is only a veil.
He who understands number
understands form.
S.P.D.S.
One single
true fire
in all things
Year 1780
What AI thinks about Page 2:
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This isn't a forest-it's one tree. The world's largest cashew tree in Natal, Brazil, spans over 8,500 m², covering a whole city block.
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Machine Learning for the Genetic Engineering of Fungal Secondary Metabolite Clusters: A Novel Framework for Alien Communication
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has long scanned the skies for radio signals. But what if an advanced civilization's signature isn't a broadcast, but a biological program?
Hypothesis
Mastery over a planet's biology is the ultimate technology. Instead of fleeting electromagnetic waves, a persistent, self-replicating message could be encoded into the very blueprint of life - an engineered gene cluster in a hardy organism like a fungus, designed to survive deep space and seed itself on new worlds.
Fungal Gene Clusters: Nature's Data Cassette
Fungal secondary metabolite (SM) clusters are modular genetic programs. Enzymes like Polyketide Synthases (PKSs) are built from domains (A-T-C-KR-ER-ACP...) in a precise order. This sequence is a code. In theory, it could be repurposed. A non-functional, hyper-complex cluster discovered in a space-borne spore might not be for making a toxin - it could be a biochemical QR code, a message etched in DNA that can last for eons and travel between stars.
Machine Learning is the Decoder
Decoding such a message, however, would be impossible by eye. It would require advanced machine learning—trained on every known natural and engineered biological pattern—to first recognize the cluster as artificially designed, then reverse-engineer its domain sequence into a payload: an image, a mathematical constant, a map.
This isn't just speculation - it's a new lens for our own research. As we use AI to genetically engineer fungal SM clusters for new drugs and materials, we are learning to write and read this deep language of biology. We are developing the very tools needed to one day ask: Is this fungus from Earth, or is it a message in a bottle, waiting for a reader smart enough to understand it?
We're not just engineering fungi. We're building the translator for a conversation that may have already begun.
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A Rail Zeppelin And A Steam Train Near The Railway Platform. Berlin, Germany, 1931
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Einstein's most valuable letter
In 1922, at Tokyo during his lecture tour Albert Einstein tipped a courier with handwritten note instead of cash, saying they might one day be worth more. One read: “A quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest.” In October 2017, that note sold for $1.56 million at Winner's auction house in Jerusalem.
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Timeless
"If you practice deeply enough, you get out of time, you enter timelessness. And that is possible with the practice of great insight. We know that the notion of weeks, years, the beginning of the year, the new year, the old year, all these are invented by the human mind.
Let us imagine the new year is flying from the east to the west. Now it's almost 10 o'clock in Bangkok and there will be two more hours for the new year to come. But in France they need more time to come. So the new year is flying, time is traveling in space. And that is entirely the human creation, the notion of time & space, a creation of our mind.
And that is why it is possible to free ourselves from the notion of time/space as two distinctive entities. Modern science speaks already of non-locality and they gave the hint that if we look deeply enough, we'll be able to transcend the notion of time & space. And this is the deepest practice within Buddhism. If you are very mindful & concentrated, you can get the kind of insight that brings you out of time/space & touch timelessness."
- Thich Nhat Hanh -
Japanese map published at the start of the World War 2, ca. 1939.
Designed by Ichisaburō Sawai and titled 'Pictorial Map of the Great European War', the map shows Germany and the Soviet Union invading Poland, with British and French Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier looking on in concern. Air and naval battles also take place in the West. Mussolini looks angrily across the Adriatic. Hitler occupies the centre of the map.
Seemingly produced as an educational map for children, not necessarily propagandistic but interesting all the same. Ichisaburō Sawai produced at least one other, more openly propagandistic map (or board game?) later in the war (ca. 1944) celebrating the Japanese Empire.
Translation of the text at the bottom:
With the involvement of Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and others, the war between Germany and Poland is on the verge of becoming a world war.
Japan has decided to quickly resolve the China incident without paying attention to the European war, but it seems that the United States and Italy will be dragged into the war whether they want to or not.
The German army invaded Poland, occupying various areas with incredible force, and together with the Soviet army attacking from the east, they nearly devoured the whole country. They then turned their forces west, ready for a decisive battle with British and French forces on the French border.
There are two great fortresses here, the famous Siegfried Line and the Maginot Line, which the German and the French built using all their ingenuity, and it is said that they are difficult to breach no matter how hard an attacker tries.
In addition, the German air force, which has been hiding its strength until now, will begin to show its true strength and probably fight against the British and French air forces, so there will likely be some fierce air battles happening soon. -
Eric Ambler On Bullshit
"Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through it"
Related: Journey into Fear (2011) by Eric Ambler, Read by Richard Greenwood (Video)
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Sir Basil Zaharoff: The Mystery Man of Europe Who Sold Both Sides
There was once a man who sold submarines to Greece and Turkey simultaneously — faulty ones, to both. He then bought Monaco. He helped birth what would become British Petroleum. Occultists claimed he was the reincarnation of an immortal alchemist. Anton LaVey dedicated The Satanic Bible to him. When he died in 1936, the financial architecture he moved through was just crystallizing into something permanent.
His name was Sir Basil Zaharoff, GCB, GBE — born Vasileios Zacharias (Βασίλειος Ζαχαρίας Ζαχάρωφ) in the Ottoman Empire, 1849. One of the richest men in the world during his lifetime. Known to contemporaries as the "Merchant of Death" and the "Mystery Man of Europe."
Sir Basil Zaharoff — the "Mystery Man of Europe"
The Merchant of Death
Born in 1849 in the Ottoman Empire to a Greek family, Zaharoff's first job was as a tour guide in Constantinople's Galata district. His second was as a firefighter — a profession that, in 19th-century Istanbul, meant salvaging treasures from burning buildings for wealthy clients. He spoke a dozen languages. He understood, early, that borders are suggestions and that those who move between them hold the cards.
By his thirties, he was the Balkan representative for Thorsten Nordenfelt's arms company. His signature move — later known as Système Zaharoff — was selling weapons to both sides of a conflict, sometimes delivering machinery he knew to be faulty. He didn't just profit from wars — he helped engineer them into existence.
The submarine deals are the purest example. First, he sold a steam-powered submarine to Greece. Then he went to the Turks and warned them: Greece now has a dangerous new weapon. Frightened, they bought two. Then he visited the Russians and explained that the Turks would soon control the Black Sea. They bought two more. Five submarines sold, all of them nearly useless. When the Ottomans tested theirs by launching a torpedo, the vessel capsized and sank.
His sabotage was as elegant as his salesmanship. When the American inventor Hiram Maxim developed a machine gun far superior to Nordenfelt's, Zaharoff sabotaged three consecutive public demonstrations: in La Spezia, he got Maxim's men so drunk the night before that they couldn't operate the gun; in Vienna, he tampered with the weapon mid-demo; at a third showing, he planted rumors that Maxim couldn't mass-produce. By 1888, Maxim had no choice but to merge with Nordenfelt — with Zaharoff taking a large commission and eventually becoming an equal partner. He bought his competition by breaking it first.
The Casino and the Oil
Zaharoff didn't just sell death. He bought pleasure. When Monaco's Société des Bains de Mer — the company that owns the Monte Carlo Casino — fell into debt, Zaharoff acquired it and revitalized it. The merchant of death became the landlord of Europe's most glamorous gambling den. The same hands that signed arms contracts now signed checks for the roulette tables.
And there's more. He was instrumental in the incorporation of a company that would become a predecessor to British Petroleum. Oil, the fuel of the 20th century's wars, was also his business. He understood what few did at the time: whoever controls the substrate — whether weapons, energy, or entertainment — controls the game.
The Monte Carlo Casino wasn't just a business. It was a meeting point for aristocrats, spies, and the strange fraternity of men who moved between visible power and its shadows. In that era, the line between the gambling table and the war room was thin. The same circles that frequented Monte Carlo also populated the lodges, the salons, and the secret societies of the age.
The Occultist's Muse
French esotericist René Guénon — one of the 20th century's most influential traditionalist thinkers — speculated that Zaharoff might be the modern incarnation of "Master Rakoczi," an earthly representative of the so-called "Unknown Superiors." In occult tradition, Master Rakoczi is identified with the Count of St. Germain — the legendary 18th-century figure who claimed to be centuries old, who appeared in the courts of Europe with seemingly impossible knowledge, and who vanished without a verified death.
Was Zaharoff the Count, returned? Guénon thought it possible.
Decades later, Anton LaVey — founder of the Church of Satan — dedicated his Satanic Bible to Zaharoff, honoring him as an embodiment of Machiavellian will-to-power. LaVey later named his grandson "Stanton Zaharoff" in tribute. The merchant of death had become a patron saint of the Left-Hand Path.
And the fiction writers saw it too. Eric Ambler modeled the sinister Dimitrios on Zaharoff in A Coffin for Dimitrios. George Bernard Shaw transmuted him into Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara. Hergé put him in Tintin as the arms dealer Basil Bazaroff in The Broken Ear. He appears in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Ezra Pound's Cantos (as "Metevsky"). Even the James Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld — the bald mastermind of SPECTRE — is believed to owe his lineage to the Mystery Man of Europe.
The Hidden Empire
Zaharoff died in 1936, in Monte Carlo, in the casino principality he had rescued from bankruptcy. But the architecture of invisible power he moved through was just being formalized.
Six years before his death, a peculiar institution had been founded in Basel, Switzerland: the Bank for International Settlements — the "central bank of central banks." It would survive two world wars, operate during Nazi occupation, and emerge as the quiet backbone of global finance. A tower in Basel where the world's central bankers meet in private, beyond the reach of any single nation. The networks Zaharoff had navigated — arms manufacturers, oil companies, sovereign wealth, intelligence services — were crystallizing into permanent infrastructure.
And not just the visible networks. The same years that saw the BIS founded also saw the proliferation of Egyptian Rites, Martinist lodges, and neo-Templar orders across Europe. Theodor Reuss was passing the torch of the O.T.O. The visible and invisible worlds were both reorganizing after the Great War. Zaharoff had operated in both. Now both were institutionalizing.
Fast forward ninety years. Switzerland still hosts the nerve center — Glencore, Vitol, Nestlé, Novartis — all interlocked with the same capital blocs and banking networks that trace back to that 1930 tower.
Empires don't fail — they transform. The Roman Empire became a church. The British Empire became a bank. The American Empire became the internet. The power structures Zaharoff navigated didn't disappear when borders were redrawn or wars ended. They shape-shifted. They went underground. They became infrastructure. He wasn't an anomaly. He was a prototype.
The Epistemic Firewall
So why does this all feel fantastical when you first hear it? Why does the thread from a Greek arms dealer to Swiss commodity giants to esoteric lodges to Basel banking towers sound like fiction?
Because the best-kept secrets don't need guards. They're protected by something more powerful: public incredulity. As someone once noted — the attribution is disputed — "Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."
The grand secrets persist not through suppression of evidence, but through the contamination of epistemology itself. You don't hide the truth — you make belief in it structurally impossible.
The Deeper You Look
The record does not simplify. He was a bigamist — married Emily Burrows in England, then Jeannie Billings in New York for her inheritance. When exposed, he fled. He called himself Count Zaharoff and, later, Prince Zacharias Basileus Zacharoff. In 1883, in Galway, he lured young Irish women onto ships with promises of factory work in Massachusetts. He seduced María del Pilar, Duchess de Villafranca de los Caballeros, cousin to the King of Spain, and married her after her husband's death. He cultivated the prima ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska to access the Czarist court. He once attempted to bribe the entire Ottoman Empire with £10 million in gold to defect from Germany. By 1911, he sat on the board of Vickers. During the First World War, the company produced 4 battleships, 53 submarines, 2,400 cannons, and 120,000 machine guns. He was close friends with British Prime Minister Lloyd George and Greek Prime Minister Venizelos. He was knighted twice.
The more you learn, the less he resolves into a single story. He remains, as he was in life, the Mystery Man of Europe. There exists, supposedly, a pamphlet in the Bibliothèque nationale attributed to "Z.Z." and dated 1923, which claims the Count of St. Germain legend was itself a cover story — manufactured by the arms trade to provide deniability for men who could not be seen to exist. The pamphlet has never been authenticated. Its catalog number is 616.936.
Coda
In 1927, nine years before his death, Zaharoff burned all his papers and diaries. When his will was read, it listed assets of only £193,000 — a fraction of the fortune he had claimed. Where did the billions go?
The structures are still running. If you have read this far, you are already inside them.
Related
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A Fun LLM Prompt for Excavating Weird but Real History
Take a real historical person or event X.
1. Begin with strictly factual context about X.
2. Identify one obscure, marginal, or forgotten adjacent fact (a minor invention, footnote, coincidence, secondary figure, or parallel event).
3. Follow that thread outward, step by step, into a surprising but real connection.
Present this as a short, playful story, but clearly separate:
- what is verified history
- what is speculative interpretation
The goal is not fantasy, but delight through improbable truth.Bonus Prompt
"Rewrite this text as if Jorge Luis Borges created it".
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Recent developments in Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD)
In 2026, the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model has evolved from a tool for emergency responders into a cross-disciplinary framework for high-stakes decision-making in digital and automated environments. The current evolution focuses on the following key areas:
1. Integration with Artificial Intelligence (AI): As of 2026, RPD is increasingly used to design and evaluate AI systems, moving beyond simple automation to "Human-AI Teaming".
- AI Explainability: Researchers are using RPD to help AI systems explain their "decisions" in ways that align with human mental models, making it easier for human operators to trust or override AI recommendations.
- AIQ (Artificial Intelligence Quotient): Gary Klein and colleagues have developed the AIQ toolkit to help humans better understand and manage the specific AI systems they interact with, applying NDM principles to complex tech stacks.
2. Computational & Probabilistic Models: Advancements in 2025 and 2026 have led to the creation of Probabilistic Memory-Enhanced RPD (PRPD) models.
- Dynamic Information Processing: These newer models, such as those used in mid-air collision avoidance for pilots, can process continuous real-time data automatically without human-defined categories.
- Pattern Maturity: PRPD models show how "prototypes" or mental patterns automatically strengthen as an agent (human or machine) gains more experience.
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Hologram News: Holograms Influence Brain & Universe as hologram
Researchers use Ultrasound Holograms to Influence Brain Networks
For the first time, a new ultrasound technique allows researchers to stimulate multiple locations in the brain simultaneously. This opens up new possibilities for treating devastating brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and depression in the future.
Information and Quantum Physics: The Universe as a hologram
The exploration of quantum information challenges objective reality, positing the universe as a hologram. This piece examines how informational algorithms drive everything from the emergence of physical laws and time to the ultimate nature of consciousness as an emergent property
