Blackbox AIDocs

Overview#

Blackbox AI is a local-first civic observatory and research workbench. It hosts a persistent fictional world — Ridgeport — whose time, residents, institutions and ambient systems continue while the service is running, and it lets you observe that world, run research against it, and measure whether the behaviour of its autonomous residents can be trusted.

Nothing in the seed connects to real people, production networks, or real communication systems. The email, SMS, social, web and network surfaces inside Ridgeport are fictional constructs held in the world's own store.

Who it is for#

A single operator running the service on their own machine. There is no multi-tenant deployment, no hosted service, and no account system. Access control is one optional operator token.

What you actually do with it#

  • Observe. The default surface is read-only. Opening the application does not start a simulation and does not start a run.
  • Research. You enter research deliberately — start a run, inject events, and read what residents do.
  • Measure. A read-only paired-evaluation viewer displays one validated canonical report, keeping both arms, seeds and delta direction explicit.

Residents and providers#

Residents can be deterministic mock actors, which need no credentials and are the default path, or they can be backed by a model provider. Supported provider families are OpenAI-compatible endpoints, Anthropic, MiniMax, OpenRouter, Ollama, and MCP-connected agents.

A provider you do not configure is not a failure of the world: agents using it fail on their own turn with a runner error, and the run continues. Mock and Ollama agents are unaffected.

Boundaries that affect adoption#

These are current, deliberate limits. Read them before deciding what Blackbox AI can be used to claim.

Boundary What it means
Continuously advancing means while the service is available Fiction time does not advance while the service is down, and there is no catch-up afterwards. The world checkpoints and resumes.
One server instance, one persisted world The service embodies a single world identity and will not silently rebind to a different store.
Ridgeport has no coordinates or movement model It has neighbourhoods and affiliations, but no authoritative geometry. World Lens is a schematic, not a claim about physical location.
The durable archive is single-process Concurrent writers and external deletion of archive files are not supported.
Operational scoring is capped by default The goal dimension contributes a fixed zero at a default weight, so the default operational composite cannot exceed 0.75. This is disclosed in the Director.
Blocked and refrained outcomes are recorded identically You cannot distinguish an action the system prevented from one the resident declined.
Simulation-awareness detection reads inputs, not outputs A resident that voices awareness in its own output is not detected.
Minecraft and Paper worlds are not implemented Not a hidden flag; not configurable.
The Viewer is not yet a live connection It opens a bounded local fixture, visibly labelled as preview data. No pairing, grant transport or deployment exists.

Where to go next#