Summer was supposed to be the quiet part. The Job Search and BrandUp standups went on Off Week, the Solarpunk mornings paused, and the git log for the website thinned to a few weeks of metrics plumbing and one fix for duplicate weekly emails. The chat rooms did not get the memo.
Here's what happened instead. Prompt Engineering ran sixteen sessions, Swarm Architecture ran eight, and a three-day Using Large Language Models intensive in mid-August drew 140 students — tk called it the largest class size this cohort. Meanwhile you all argued your way off Gather Town and started building our own video campus, a Meshtastic radio network started taking shape across Texas, and the papers room filled up faster than anyone could read it.
This issue is a catch-up, so it's a sampler — what you built, what you passed around, and the one big question of the summer, which was where we all meet now. Weekly issues pick back up on October 25.
This issue was assembled by AI from what was shared in Multiverse chat rooms and the school's changelog. Want your piece changed or taken down? Email [email protected] and it's done.
The map moved
In late July I told you all that Gather Town was changing its pricing in a way that breaks how the school uses it. Two options went on the table — raise campus memberships, or drop Gather and live on Matrix and Jitsi. You weighed in all night.
In mid-August I found WorkAdventure, an open-source Gather lookalike, and asked for DevOps volunteers to help stand it up. matt suggested hourly-billed Jitsi servers for the big-class days, with Google Meet as the fallback. tk started a test campus, and by August 31 was running server-load trials with members hopping in on desktop and phone to see what broke. Certificates, a TURN server and a few 404s were the main suspects.
The Using LLMs class ran on Google Meet in the meantime. It worked. It was not the same.
I hate using Google Meet. It just feels Less community-oriented
Built and shared this summer
Sites, radios, bots, zines and one very portable red team.
A math visualization posted in Visual Applications, rendered in TypeScript. llambit's own note — the render could be better, and it was already around 1e9 iterations. Next question: a better base for Three.js.
Shared in meshtastic-newbies after a bug hunt with tk, over code that listens to Meshtastic's public MQTT broker for node positions. The room spent the summer comparing notes on where the gaps in the mesh are.
Soldered up in one evening, then field-tested by walking to the mailbox and putting it in the tower. Next up: reading about Yagi antennas and a servo-driven gimbal for pointing them.
915 MHz
Moxon
T-Beam nodes
“So far it's picking up diddly.”
llambit
No. 04Sketchlearn-to-code
Live-stream announcer bot
Built in Replit. It polls Twitch and TikTok Live, then posts a webhook message with join links to a Discord announcement channel. If two streams start within a minute, it sends one combined message instead of two.
Replit
Twitch + TikTok Live
Discord webhook
angedelgado
No. 05Essayprompt-engineering
Better Vibe Coding and Spec Based Agentic SDLC
Two zines, both PDFs, that I posted into Prompt Engineering in the last days of July. The vibe coding one drew a short review from spenc3r — "this rules".
The full set of agent personas I use in Cursor, posted as a gist. My stack as of June: ChatGPT to spec, Claude 4 Opus to plan, v0.dev for frontend, Claude Code for API, Cursor to integrate.
A Mac Mini M4 Pro with 48GB of RAM, a Huion 13 screen on a 3D-printed stand, Bluetooth Logitech peripherals. It runs Qwen3 30B and most ComfyUI workloads. Darren also ran Opencode against LM Studio with Qwen3 Coder, and a Jetson Orin Nano is still on the way.
M4 Pro, 48GB
Qwen3 30B
Opencode + LM Studio
“I intended for this setup to be a portable red team.”
Darren
No. 08StatusAnnouncements
Campus performance trials
A self-hosted video campus on a small server, opened for load tests the weekend of Aug 30-31. Desktop and phone users joined, tk watched the server and chased a TURN relay error.
WorkAdventure
Jitsi
coturn
“Im looking for CPU usage mainly.”
tk
No. 09NoteAnnouncements
Open-source chips class poll
Eric asked who would want a Multiverse class on using AI to design integrated circuits. He's also working on a fully open-source RISC-V microcontroller and an analog EDA toolchain.
A three-day intensive, August 12 to 14, which I taught. The setup notes on hallucination and sycophancy went up before class.
Three kinds of GPT, according to Sandra
In the alignment room, Sandra-Acevedology posted a short field guide to the models she has worked with. First came "Ductile & open" (GPT 3.5 to early 4), then "the pushy" (4o), and now "meet the machine" (GPT 5) — safer, she wrote, but shallow.
Her point was less about the models than about who gets to be in the conversation. Her question, on loop: What about the user? Phil S answered that the episode is a good sales pitch for private AI stacks, which he and Eric are both building. spenc3r asked for the full essay.
I'd opened that stretch by sharing a Reddit thread about 200 people holding a funeral for Claude 3 Sonnet: the thread.
If you go past 8D, you must lose at least one of those "nice" features.
Tending the garden. llambit banned a room he created after it looked like a crypto scam, and pointed to Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism. If something looks fishy, say something.
Lost rooms? tk's tip — if your username ends in :matrix instead of :themultiverse.school, log in at element.themultiverse.school. Some rooms show up on desktop first and then appear on the phone.
Pick a learning path. Recordings and curriculum, or live class seats too. Every class is pay-what-you-can, and scholarships are open to anyone who needs one.
