Introduction

draft first full version, 2026-07-18. Tracked as sail-0jz4.

SAIL (Socratic AI Learning Lab) is Torsten’s bootstrapped continuation of the SAITO research thread after the SPRIND NFAI, BiTS, and Foresight Berlin funding rejections (all June 2026). This compendium exists because trying to summarize all of it in a single short, personal follow-up email didn’t work — there was too much real material to compress, and the email also needed to stay short and personal. So instead: publish what’s actually real — ideation, scope, refinements, research, and educational material — as one compendium, and point each collaborator at the parts most relevant to them.

The original AIDLE pathway

Before the individual chapters, it’s worth knowing the bigger shape SAITO was originally scoped in, so terms like “the scaffolding model” and “the trajectory model” have a home. AIDLE — the proposal this whole thread descends from — split SAITO into three coupled questions, each with its own named component: WHAT to ask (the SSA, Socratic Scaffold Agent), WHO you’re asking (the STM, Skill Trajectory Model), and WHEN to ask it (the TSS, Temporal Scaffolding Scheduler) — a closed loop, where an outcome measurement weeks later feeds back into updating WHO. The full figure and a precise built/not-built breakdown are in the Appendix; the short version:

• SSA (the scaffolding model) is built and live — sail-judge, the entire subject of chapter 1.
• STM (the trajectory model) is new territory — chapter 5 is a scaffold stub, not a design; nothing exists yet beyond the idea that it should.
• TSS isn’t started at all — no chapter covers it, and a cross-repo asset scan found no precedent for it anywhere, the same greenfield status as GAT enforcement in chapter 1.

Worth being precise about what this framing is and isn’t: it’s the original pathway, kept as a map so the parts of this compendium that exist can be located within it — not a claim that all three legs are underway. Exactly one is.

How this is organized

Each of the first four chapters is loosely framed around a specific collaborator’s own interests, without naming them explicitly in the text — the chapter boundary does the personalizing, not a name-drop. The fifth chapter is deliberately general rather than person-framed, since STM (above) is cross-cutting groundwork rather than one collaborator’s angle.

1. Bandit-arm design, Goodhart taxonomy & GAT — the design/theory thread; also where SSA — the one built leg of the pathway above — is actually explained in depth.
2. Learning-science grounding & joint study/HPC design — the learning-research thread.
3. EEG/fMRI as a human-grounding reward signal — the neuroscience thread, plus a live workshop angle, plus a speculative survey of what might work better than EEG for a live signal.
4. HTP projective-analysis toy example — a newer, still-unscoped neuroscience/projective-analysis thread.
5. Skill Trajectory Models — the STM leg of the pathway above; general, not collaborator-framed; not yet drafted beyond an outline.

Each chapter’s outline and source material is tracked as its own bean — see the chapter’s own “Status” line for the exact bean ID.

What’s real vs. what’s speculative

This compendium tries to keep an honest line between what’s actually running (the sail-judge scaffold agent, live on trullala; the Thompson-sampling notebook; the artifacts/ design-note series) and what’s still an open question, a parked idea, or a toy example that hasn’t been scoped yet. Where a chapter is speculative, it says so — this is meant to read as “here’s what ’s real, not a pitch deck,” the same framing sailing.tilde.style already carries.