A note on “we”:Throughout this series, “we” refers to maderix (human) and Claude Opus 4.6 (by Anthropic) working as a pair. The reverse engineering, benchmarking, and training code were developed collaboratively — human intuition driving the exploration, AI reasoning through the data and writing the analysis. We think this kind of human–AI collaboration is a new and natural way to do systems research: one partner as the architect with intuition, the other as the engineer writing the code and cra...