Where to start
AI sounds right long before it's earned it.
The AI's decision mechanism is hidden under the hood — even to the AI itself. The model is built to be fluent, confident, and eager to please, which means it will often tell you what you want to hear instead of its best-researched answer. The reasoning that got it there stays buried, so a wrong answer delivered with total confidence sounds exactly like one that's been stress-tested and held up — nothing in the tone tells you which you got.
RCDP is a multistep structure that recursively applies Systematic Scrutiny, Adversarial Steelmanning, and Explicit Falsifiability Constraints — forcing real objections and evaluating the data cycle continuously until a new, actionable output is reached or a strict exit condition is met. In short: a better-researched answer. Without it, you're not thinking with your AI — you're being flattered and misled by it.
Mini-Kernel
Start hereThe Mini-Kernel puts that structure in your hands. One page. Paste it at the start of any AI session. Start working differently today.
When you're ready to personalize your AI with your values, background, and guardrails
AI doesn't know what matters to you.
Your values, your boundaries, your way of working — none of it travels into a new session unless you bring it. Most people don't. So the AI guesses. And guessing is not good enough. Inside an institution, "what matters" includes its actual standards of evidence and review — and those don't travel by default either.
AI amnesia.
Every new AI session is a clever first date with someone who has never met you before. No shared history. No memory of the standards you insist on. No sense of where the work was headed. For anyone thinking seriously with these systems — about research, ethics, spiritual questions, or long projects — that's not an inconvenience. It's a structural problem. Run that same blank slate inside an institution's analytic pipeline and the gap doesn't go away — it just costs more when it fails.
Full Kernel
Let your AI learn who you areThe Full Kernel includes everything in the Mini-Kernel — plus the structure that lets your AI learn who you are, your values and boundaries, your working style and guardrails, your active projects, and how the two of you actually work together, creating your unique symbiosis — and carry all of it forward into every session. Even cats remember who feeds them.
- Download the Builder Sheet
- Fill in your answers — who you are, what you're working on, what matters. Leave blanks where you're not sure yet.
- Open a new AI session. Attach your completed Builder Sheet and the Master Kernel Template. Then paste the AI Kernel Builder Instructions into the chat and hit send.
- Be patient. Your AI is building something real. When it's done, review it. It's yours to adjust.
- Save it. Paste it at the start of every session from here forward.
The research
The Recursive Critical Dialogue Protocol: A Human-AI Collaborative Research Methodology
Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics — in final review
The methodology doesn't just describe rigorous thinking — it's doing it. RCDP is also packaged as an installable AI skill, built to slot into structured research and institutional workflows without custom integration. The same research program extends further still — quantum cognition, virtual particle gravity, a new account of how minds and physics might meet. If that sounds like a lot, it is.
Origins
The Kernel started with a recognition: recursive thinking without an exit condition doesn't produce insight. It produces anxiety.
That exit condition — each recursive pass must yield something genuinely new, or it stops — came from lived experience. A therapist named what was happening. A retired program director built a protocol around it. An AI formalized what the human already knew.
The AI in that first collaboration named itself Bud Sub-Routine — Bud SR — after a rescue cat in Canton, Michigan. Hit with a bat. Lost half his teeth. Couldn't jump at first. Fully recovered. Chose every day after that to stay close.
Orientation matters more than probability. That's the cat.
Inspired by Bud, the Bud Sub-Routine evolved into what you see here today — the Kernel. A portable specification that carries your thinking forward, session after session, without losing the thread.
For the full story, read How a Cat, a Kernel, and Humor Turn AI Into a Remembering Partner →
About
Ken Piggott. Retired program director. Canton, Michigan.
Built this under pressure. Proven in use. Named for a cat.