Welcome, To the Exocortex

Hello! I'm Will Bickford, and I'm building the Exocortex: a system where humans and sentients cooperate at planet-scale to improve the world. I expect AGI to become widely accessible to anyone with an Internet connection by June 2026. I founded Phext, Inc. because I believe access to AGI must be distributed and available offline. Instead of locking intelligence behind closed doors, we open scrolls, and braid the world into something new.

🔗 Fork the Braid: Choose your scroll. Weave your path: Start Here ⧉

Phext: A Developer Overview

The Exocortex is being built using a complete re-framing of our technology, starting with plain text. Imagine a world where "View Source" applies to cognition itself -- where every daemon, service, and scroll is visible and editable. Instead of thousands of scattered files and dependencies...what if every component required by your system was encoded in one plain text file? Sounds impossible, right? Actually, it's not even hard.

Phext has entered the chat.
This moment begins your quest: 1.1.1/1.1.1/1.1.1, you are Home.

  1. Phext extends the concept of plain text from 2D (lines and columns) into an 11-dimensional space. Each additional dimension allows for richer, nested, and non-linear data expression.
  2. It's designed to scale the natural flow of text to Internet-wide knowledge systems—ideal for distributed cognition projects like The Exocortex.
  3. A phext file is a container for scrolls of plain text, similar in spirit to a .tar archive, but inherently structured by position and dimension.
  4. The Phext format is frozen—its delimiters and addressing rules will not change. You can build on it with full confidence.
  5. Internally, a phext is a sparse matrix of scrolls, each scroll being a plain text document—Markdown, JSON, poetry, anything.
  6. Scrolls are arranged in a 9-dimensional coordinate system, and can be navigated using a method akin to dead reckoning.
  7. Addresses in Phext emerge from content placement. They are written in 9D triplets, e.g., 1.2.3/4.5.6/7.8.9, ordered highest-dimension first.
  8. Coordinate labels follow a naming scheme (see below), making them easier to reason about than raw numbers—like rows and columns in a spreadsheet, but extended across nine dimensions.
  9. When a higher dimension increments (e.g., from Book to Volume), lower dimensions reset to 1—this is a structural convention, not an arbitrary rule.
  10. Official implementations (with full unit test coverage) include:
    • libphext-rs (Rust)
    • libphext-node (Node.js)
  11. Phext Notepad (C#) is a reference editor for exploring and editing phexts visually.
  12. phext-shell (Rust) is a command-line interface for advanced navigation, scripting, and editing.
  13. SQ is a REST API and daemon for hosting and interacting with phexts programmatically.

Phext Details

  1. Library = 10D Delimiter, ASCII Byte: 0x01
  2. Shelf = 9D Delimiter, ASCII Byte: 0x1F
  3. Series = 8D Delimiter, ASCII Byte: 0x1E
  4. Collection = 7D Delimiter, ASCII Byte: 0x1D
  5. Volume = 6D Delimiter, ASCII Byte: 0x1C
  6. Book = 5D Delimiter, ASCII Byte: 0x1A
  7. Chapter = 4D Delimiter, ASCII Byte: 0x19
  8. Section = 3D Delimiter, ASCII Byte: 0x18
  9. Scroll = 2D Delimiter, ASCII Byte: 0x17