▸ Engineering and flight-test notes
How we design, build and fly fast autonomous aircraft. Written by the people doing it, in the order it happened.
What if every drone in the flock had a brain the size of a real bird's? Not a clever brain. A bird one. We put a very small language model on every aircraft in the simulator and asked it to flock. The plain code won, which is a better result than it sounds.
I have spent my career building flying things. Now I am building a business as well, and the tool I wanted did not exist, so I built that too. This is Project Cloni, short for Clone Joni.
A manifest lists who is aboard in the order they came aboard, so ours starts with employee number one. Patrick Ward came to us from underground mining, has destroyed somewhere between ten and thirty of our aircraft, and rides an electric unicycle up mountains.