Cody Lee Walker

Independent researcher · s2ar.dev

Cody Lee Walker

I build instruments that check the work (certificates computed in seconds, records anyone can replay) and I write about what they find.

My path here ran through game development, then the real-time shaders and interface history of my PhD research, before the question that holds me now: what makes a task learnable, and when.

Writing

Essays, and the research they come out of

Everything I’ve written →

Work

s2ar: the tools that check the work

Most of what I build lives at s2ar.dev: a game engine and the worlds made in it, and the tools that check the work. Certification, reproducible checks, image work and poetic forms, each answer carrying a signed record anyone can verify for free. The examples run every walkthrough for real and re-derive every number before they publish; the lab holds the compression research.

Preprint · cs.LG

Certificates That Survive Scale

A Model-Free Difficulty Certificate Predicts Proxy Validity Across Model Scale and Family · Cody Lee Walker · 2026 · forthcoming, arXiv cs.LG

A cheap, model-free difficulty certificate predicts a task's capability threshold, but only above a measurable capability floor (here, between 1.7B and 4B parameters), replicated across three model families. The law it proposes: a proxy is valid for a task iff its capability exceeds the certificate-predicted threshold. A rigorous negative anchors it: information-theoretic constraint density does not govern LLM constrained-generation difficulty; constraint count does. Every result is seed-pinned and byte-reproducible from sealed transcripts.

Contact

Emailcody@codylee.ca
ORCIDorcid.org/0009-0003-9858-5747
Elsewheregames · social