Spatial Cognition Instrument · 2026
A thinking tool for thoughts that aren’t ready to resolve.
Place fragments first. The system reveals relations before it names meaning.
Most thinking tools push toward resolution too early. Intuition Canvas holds the moment before a thought becomes a conclusion. Fragments (image, sound, text) sit in a spatial field where position is meaning. The system reads the arrangement and returns not an answer, but a reflection of the shape you have made.
Once I placed a photograph of Gaudí’s stone, a word for tapas, and an image of olive oil, and it returned a line I had not typed.
A reasonable person might ask whether this is a thin shell around a chat model. Fair question. The answer lives in three design decisions.
01 · The arrangement is the input
The model never sees the canvas. The browser computes each fragment’s weight from its distance to the center, where weight equals one minus distance over maximum distance, so a fragment at the heart of the canvas carries near-full weight and one at the edge barely registers. On project, the system sorts by weight and translates the geometry into language before anything leaves the screen: “Casa Milà” [text] (78%). Position is meaning, and the translation from position to meaning is the instrument’s work, not the model’s.
02 · The voice is constrained before it speaks
MIRROR_PROTOCOL is a system-level instruction that shapes the reflection before a single word is generated. It casts the model as a sensory translator, restricts it to vocabulary a seven-year-old knows, bans a growing list of stock-poetry words, and locks the output to a fixed structure of layered readings. Nothing is filtered afterward. The server returns the model’s answer untouched, which means the discipline has to live upstream, in the design, not downstream in cleanup.
03 · The pipe is closed
Requests travel from the browser to my server to the model and back. The server holds the API key, the model choice, the token ceiling, and the protocol. The browser holds none of them. This is not an open passthrough to a chat model with a pretty front. It is a fixed instrument in which the model is one replaceable part, and the part that makes it an instrument, what counts as input, what weight means, what vocabulary the reflection may use, is the design.
The tool does not store its outputs. Each reflection is ephemeral by design, material for the next arrangement. But the protocol has a memory of its own habits. It learned to ban the poetic phrasing it once reached for. The same three fragments, projected four months apart, no longer speak the same way.
2026 · 03 — early projection
“sun-baked grit. liquid gold trapped in glass, waiting.”
2026 · 07 — same fragments, current protocol
“bumpy. hard. cold tiles under palm. warm sun on neck. slick. greasy fingers. sharp edges of broken pieces. smooth glass bottle. hot in throat. salty. chewy. oily lips.”
detected pattern: warm and slick · hard then soft · rough holds smooth
The 2026–07 reading is a live capture (Gaudí stone · olive oil · “tapas”), model claude-opus-4-5, as of July 2026. The earlier line cannot recur. Its phrasing is now on the banned list.