I’m Dan Groch. I build AI systems and think about what it would take to make them genuinely intelligent.

Most of my work sits at the intersection of AI engineering, cognitive science, and system design — with a particular focus on metacognition, theory of mind, and consciousness as engineering problems rather than philosophical ones. I’m interested in the gap between systems that perform tasks and systems that understand what they’re doing, and I think closing that gap is the most important work in AI right now.

I build with OpenClaw, an open-source agent framework designed around these ideas. If you’re interested in how metacognition works in practice — not as a concept but as implementation decisions — that’s where the code lives.

This blog is where I work through the harder questions in public. Some posts will be technical. Some will be more speculative. All of them will be honest about what we know, what we don’t, and where I think the interesting problems are.

Get in touch

I like hearing from people who are thinking about this stuff too.