Research

The Foundation conducts pre-registered empirical research on the rigorous measurement and reliable production of verifiable software, and scholarly research on the methodology of empirical inquiry itself. All studies are deposited on the Open Science Framework before data collection begins, and all findings are released through peer-reviewed publication and open-access repositories with persistent digital identifiers. Replication packages accompany each study.

The Foundation commits to the public-interest publication standard articulated in Treasury Regulation §1.501(c)(3)-1(d)(5)(iii) and Revenue Ruling 76-296: substantially all the information that would be useful to the interested public is published, and any patents, copyrights, processes, formulae, or other intellectual property generated by the Foundation's research is made available to the public on a nondiscriminatory basis. No research output is gated behind paywalls, institutional subscriptions, or non-disclosure agreements.

Active research programs

1. Software-quality measurement: construct and predictive validity

Pre-registered controlled studies investigating whether the Slop Audit, a multi-dimensional measurement instrument anchored in established compliance frameworks, demonstrates construct validity for the structural-risk categories that conventional measures do not detect, and whether assessment scores predict deployment-time outcomes (defect emergence, security-finding density, durability under collaborative extension).

2. The Language-Only Hypothesis: cross-linguistic transformer-training experiments

Pre-registered controlled cross-linguistic transformer-training experiments investigating the contribution of language structure itself, separately from architecture or compute scale, to the apparent capabilities of large language models. The findings inform the public scientific record on computational linguistics, the philosophy of mind, and the structural properties of human language as a cognitive artifact.

3. Construction-discipline interventions on AI-generated code

Pre-registered controlled studies testing whether a specified construction-time discipline (the Honest Framework) shifts the trustworthiness of AI-generated code in measurable ways across multiple programming languages, multiple frontier AI systems, and multiple measurement endpoints.

4. Reference-codebase quality as input to AI code generation

Studies investigating the systematic effects of starting-point codebase properties on the trustworthiness of subsequent AI-assisted modification, and the design of reference materials that resist the documented degradation pattern. Research arm in preparation.

5. Prompting strategies as systematic interventions on AI code generation

Studies testing whether specified prompting strategies produce measurably better-than-mean code across deployment contexts and which design properties of those strategies generalize. Research arm builds on the Foundation's published Process Discipline natural-experiment work and prior axiomatic-prompting research.

Methodology research

The convergence-of-signals method

Methodological framework formalizing the inference licensed when multiple independent instruments (empirical experiments, philosophical inquiries, theological traditions) meet at the same boundary. Peer-reviewable specification with worked examples in preparation, to be released as a standalone open-access deposit under permissive license with a persistent digital identifier.

The instrument-aware scholarly discipline

Methodological position that every scientific instrument has limits, and that the discipline of asking what each instrument can and cannot adjudicate is foundational rather than peripheral. Scholarly outputs articulating this discipline and its application across multiple domains, including the recognition that large language models are instruments of observation rather than instruments of generation. See Epistemology.

Cross-traditional scholarly convenings

The Foundation hosts convenings that bring together scholars from philosophy, theology, computational linguistics, cognitive science, and adjacent humanities and social-science fields around the convergence-of-signals method. The convenings produce peer-reviewable proceedings and method specifications. The Replicators, a Foundation publication authored by the founder as part of his charitable scholarly service, serves as the focal vehicle for these convenings.

Publications

Confirmed institutional collaborators of record

Open-research commitments