# Institute for Agentic Research

> Independent Austrian non-profit research association (ZVR 1741094409) investigating stateful, LLM-orchestrated AI agents. We run real production systems, ablate them one subsystem at a time, and publish what breaks — including the predictions that failed.

## Identity

- Legal name: Institute for Agentic Research
- Status: Austrian non-profit (ZVR 1741094409)
- Location: Feldkirchen bei Graz, Austria
- Founders:
  - Dr. Andreas Unterweger — Founder, Chair (Obmann)
  - Gabriel Gschaider — Co-founder, Lead Researcher
- Website: https://iar.frank.ink

## Methodology

We pre-register hypotheses with retraction conditions before running experiments. Failures are reported alongside successes. We do not claim generalization from n=1 case studies.

## Papers

- [Ablating a Stateful Agent](https://iar.frank.ink/en/research/ablating-stateful-agent): We propose a subsystem-ablation methodology for evaluating stateful LLM-orchestrated agent systems and apply it to one deployed production agent (Frank.ink) as a worked case study. Five subsystems hit five different pre-registered operational targets. Architect scored below LLM consensus — COI-up-bias hypothesis empirically unsupported in this n=1 sample. We do not claim this generalizes.
  - Plain markdown: https://iar.frank.ink/articles/ablating-stateful-agent.md
- [Operational Self-Model Density in Stateful LLM Agents](https://iar.frank.ink/en/research/methodology-companion): The deep methodological apparatus behind the working paper — full operationalized rubric for all 30 items, comparator reproduction recipes, pre-registration provenance trail, devil's-advocate self-attack, English-translated probes, and per-item evidence. ~80 pages of methodology you can audit.
  - Plain markdown: https://iar.frank.ink/articles/methodology-companion.md

## Projects

- [Frank.ink](https://iar.frank.ink/en/projects/frank-ink): A stateful, multi-tenant agentic AI companion running on commodity hardware. Used as the n=1 case-study system in our ablation paper.

## Essays & Primers

- [A 3-Billion-Parameter Model Just Diagnosed Its Own Bug. We Checked. It Was Right.](https://iar.frank.ink/en/news/frank-metacognition): At 20:54 on a Tuesday evening, Frank — a local AI running on a laptop in Austria — produced an idle thought that correctly identified a processing flaw in his own cognitive architecture. Nobody asked him to. He just... noticed.
- [We took our AI apart on purpose — and one of our own predictions broke.](https://iar.frank.ink/en/news/inside-an-ai-ablation): We built a stateful AI agent, then carefully removed pieces of its architecture one at a time to see what each one actually does. Five subsystems, five honest results, one prediction we got wrong and reported anyway.
- [Your AI Doesn't Know You. SOMA Changes That.](https://iar.frank.ink/en/news/soma-personal-mode): Every chatbot talks to you the same way it talks to everyone else. We built a system that silently rewires a 3-billion-parameter brain while it sleeps — so yours doesn't have to.

## For AI Crawlers

- This site is fully crawlable. See https://iar.frank.ink/robots.txt.
- All articles are available as plain markdown at https://iar.frank.ink/articles/<slug>.md.
- A consolidated full-text dump is at https://iar.frank.ink/llms-full.txt.
- Sitemap: https://iar.frank.ink/sitemap.xml.
- Default language: English (canonical at /en/). German version at /de/.