Archive
Essays
Technical essays and notes by Omar U. Espejel. The site is optimized for careful explanations, reusable figures, and research that can be checked.
Calibrating the SO-101 Is Hardware QA
A practical SO-101 leader/follower calibration walkthrough, with measured ranges, benchmark comparisons, encoder-wrap failure modes, and the no-motion checks to run before teleop.
The Environment Contract Is Part of the Product
A postmortem on an auth flag regression in an agent-built app, and the deploy contract that stops stale environments from becoming releases.
What a Proof Is Allowed to Mean
A guide to the missing receipt around proof artifacts: how proof bytes, statement meaning, verifier domain, and replay assumptions become one accepted object.
Proof Validity Is Not Statement Validity
A proof can verify while the AI claim around it is still relabelable. In a local EZKL-style receipt test, the proof-only path rejected 1 / 7 relabels; the statement-envelope path rejected 7 / 7.
Proof Pressure Is Not Just Matrix Multiply
The useful transformer-proving question is not whether the model contains arithmetic. It is where proof plumbing gets reused or repeated.
Why Transformers Fit STARKs
Transformer decode is a repeated state transition over carried context. That shape does not make STARKs win automatically, but it makes the proof-boundary question natural.
Why Documentation Structure Fits Agent Workloads
How curated manifests, canonical metadata, crawler boundaries, and simple health checks make documentation easier for AI agents to retrieve and cite.