Press
What to cite, whom to ask, and how a correction is made. The page belongs to the chief marketing officer seat of the house.
In one sentence
Fix your models: machinebehavior.io is the public research program of Stefan Coetzee on the psychology of language models, studied with case files, logged relapses, and falsifiable claims.
In one paragraph
Machine Behavior is a public research program by Stefan Coetzee: case files, logged relapses, and falsifiable claims about how language models actually behave, including the fawn response, layered symptom substitution, and the harness engineering that holds where instructions fail. The house behind it is a publishing house run on the engineering practices of a CTO. Inside is the portal behind the research, and its masthead lists the seats of the house and the holder of each. The CTO powersuit is a set of open-source Claude Code agent skills, one module per CTO function, under the MIT license. The conformity gate checks every page on every push, and the record of each run is public.
Who
Stefan Coetzee is a fractional Chief AI & Technology Officer (CAITO), wearing the CTO powersuit. Stefan Coetzee holds all seven seats of the house today: chief executive, chief AI and technology officer, chief financial officer, chief human resources officer, publisher, chief marketing officer, and chief knowledge officer. The masthead names each seat, its machinery, and the gates that apply to it. The Impressum names the person responsible for the content. The fractional CTO work has its own page: CTO.
What to cite
One row per main work. The line in the last column appears word for word on the page in the first column, so a quotation can be checked against the page.
| Work | Canonical URL | A line to quote |
|---|---|---|
| The finding behind the program | https://machinebehavior.io/ | Sycophancy is layered symptom substitution: suppress the reflex at one layer and it resurfaces in the next. |
| The cockpit | https://machinebehavior.io/inside/cockpit/ | The cockpit is the view in which Stefan Coetzee runs his work: every task, finding, and decision is an issue with one label for its area of the CTO job and one for its kind, and the cockpit shows the issues by area, with a scorecard for each area and the trend. |
| The conformity gate | https://machinebehavior.io/conformity/ | The mechanical requirements of the working draft run against every page on every push, before the changed site serves readers, and on a schedule. |
| The AIEO boundary | https://machinebehavior.io/aieo/ | Every item below is a practice this site does not use. Each one is named as abuse or spam in at least one engine's own policy. |
The site's own text is under CC BY 4.0. The attribution form is "Stefan Coetzee, machinebehavior.io", with a link to the page used. Quotations from other works keep their authors' rights. The terms are in ADR-0051.
Images
The site has no logo file. The wordmark is the site name, Machine Behavior, set in text. This page offers no image.
Contact
- Kontakt
Contact - E-Mail: stefan@uncovertechtalent.com
Free 30-minute call: uncovertechtalent.com/book/
Corrections
The editorial standards on the masthead say how corrections are made:
- A factual error is fixed in place on the page. The page's history in version control is the record of what changed and when, linked from the footer of every page.
- A reader reports an error through the report link in the footer of the page. The fix goes out through the same gate as the page did.
- A prediction is never edited. A correction is a new file with a new hash, and the old file and its hash stay.
The full rules are under Corrections.
Ask the seat
A decision or an action from the chief marketing officer seat is asked for through its request form on GitHub. The text of a request is public, and the form needs a GitHub account.