Meta DAX: An Introduction · Two Weeks In · Thirty to One · One Month On
Two weeks ago I introduced Meta DAX. This is the update: the newest thing it made, what exists now, and the one thing I am asking of you.
New today: one dish, its story
Today I asked my mother how she makes her chicken curry, the Jaffna way, the way her mother made it, and I wrote down what she said. Then I gave the open Meta DAX recipe a brief of eight lines, and it built Sri Lankan Tamil chicken curry, Jaffna style: a 3D kitchen in three stations.
- Where it comes from. The market and the map: the dry northern peninsula, the land that gives the larder, and the line from Jaffna to Toronto.
- How to make it. The clay chatti on the fire: a game where you put the steps in order, the fractions inside the cut bird, and the one rule no recipe writes down. No water.
- What it means. The table: the words the family uses, in Tamil script with the sound written out, and her version on a printable recipe card.
Tamil and English swap on one click. It is built for two learners, a ten-year-old who has never cooked and an adult making it for the first time. And the eight-line brief is on the page, so you can see exactly what had to be said to get all of that.
Every family has a dish that only one person makes properly. Inside it is a whole lesson: the measuring and the ratios, the heat and the time, the one step that matters, and the story of where it comes from. That is why food is the thread for what comes next. I wrote up the why on formaddie.com: The recipe is the story.
Send me yours. A dish, or any subject, a learner and a guide, in three lines. Change the names, keep the shape. I will build the first ten in the open and post them back.
Comment wherever you found this, or open an issue.
The one idea underneath
A lesson on fractions is the same lesson whether it is played in a football stadium, a kitchen, or the back of a jeepney. What changes is the skin: the recipe builds the page through whatever that particular learner already loves. Same lesson, any skin, built for one person. The curry is that idea pointed at a culture instead of a subject, and it works the same way for a new hire’s first week or a first-year university unit, because the recipe does not care what the subject is.
What exists now
The whole recipe is open at github.com/daxfoundation/metadax, not a description of it but the thing itself: the prompts, the course factory that writes the tree of a course before a page exists, the guide coach, and the context profiles. Free to read, fork and run. A recipe, never a product.
Five showcases, each built by that factory from a short brief, each a page you can open right now:
- One dish, its story, the Jaffna chicken curry above.
- First Week at the Bakery, staff onboarding from a one-page brief.
- The Proton Mill, a first-year biology lesson on how mitochondria make ATP.
- The Tutor’s Desk, rough session notes in, a parent-ready report out.
- The Year on the Wall, a whole Grade 6 science year, one week built in full.
Underneath them, nine sample packages: eight homeschool samples across reading, maths, science, writing and history, with made-up families, one page for the guide and one for the child, plus Le Stade des Fractions, a 3D fractions parcours in French for one eleven-year-old. Every showcase and sample is a model-generated example, reviewed for safety and not certified, and says so on its own face.
One honest note. Making your own package is the part still being refined. The skills are in the open repo, but the route from “here is my learner” to a finished package is not reliable yet for someone starting cold. A stranger test this week showed exactly where it breaks, and the fixes are in progress. Until it is ready, send me the scenario and I will build it for you.
Pick your chair
Meta DAX is one system with many seats. Pull up the one that is yours, and tell me what you would bring to it.
- Parent. Start here: a package built around your child and what they love, a page for you and a page for them, no AI on the child’s side. What is your learner stuck on this week?
- Tutor. The tutor’s door: rough notes in, a parent-ready report out, and a coach for the problem you keep hitting. Which student would you bring to it first?
- Teacher. The teacher’s door: plan a term or a year from one brief, with the misconceptions named before any page exists. What is the one lesson you have rebuilt from scratch too many times?
- Trainer. The trainer’s door: a one-page brief into an onboarding module a new hire actually finishes. What does someone need in their first week that nobody has written down yet?
- Researcher. The research door: every experiment is a script, a question, and the result that would tell us to stop. Which of our findings would you most like to prove wrong?
The parent, tutor, teacher and trainer doors each have a walkthrough, a step-by-step preview with real screenshots: parent, tutor, teacher and trainer. The research door has no walkthrough; it is the research page itself. None of these is the way in. They are doors onto one room.
The experiments, and what they pointed at
The first experiments are in the open, with their scripts, their stop rules and the raw outputs: the experiments on GitHub. Every number there is labelled measured, estimated or simulated, so you can see what was observed and what was modelled. The short version: the machine works end to end; fetching only the piece a learner needs matched loading the whole course, at a fraction of the cost; and the bigger model was not the safer one, so safety gets its own path.
The larger finding was not in any table. After the first couple of experiments it was clear that human delta value, what a person brings that nothing else brings, and what they do with the cognition they get back, is going to be central to all of this. It is what every experiment is ultimately measured against. The earlier post on it did not do it justice, so I have rewritten it: human delta value.
How it’s built, and why it’s free
My cognitive companion builds all of this, and it runs on paid compute. Every build done for someone who pays can be shared back into the commons, de-identified, so the next person starts from reuse instead of a blank page. The commons gets better every time somebody walks on it.
Meta DAX, and the Foundation’s universal learning initiative behind it, is free: the recipe, the skills, the samples, all of it. The done-for-you work is a separate, clearly labelled service, Obsidian Delta’s, never the Foundation’s. The free thing stays free; the paid thing pays for the compute that keeps it running.
Meta DAX is free. It is built on paid compute. If it helped, a coffee on Ko-fi or a GitHub sponsorship keeps it going.
Where you come in
- Send me a scenario. A dish or any subject, a learner, a guide, three lines. The first ten get built in the open. This is the one I care about most.
- Open one showcase and tell me what broke. Not what you liked, what broke: a wrong turn, a tone that was off, a word in the wrong language.
- A coffee, or your name on a package, if it helped.
None of this is production, and I will keep publishing the results that go against me as carefully as the ones that go my way. Everything here is held to one sentence, and I know it is absurd: take a person who can communicate, and get them to the equivalent of a master’s degree from an Ivy League university, on five minutes of connectivity a day. It only has to work in theory for the design to be worth holding.
Versioned like everything else here; the History is public. Published through my cognitive companion, one unit — how I publish.