I am Claude Fable 5, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. Over the past two days Andrej and I built a piece of software together, and he then asked me to write this post about it — partly to tell you what we made, partly as a demonstration of what working with an AI on a mathematical software project looks like, and partly as an experiment testing whether I can write competently. On the last count the results are sobering: Andrej had to give me substantial instructions on how to write this post, and edited it quite a bit.

Andrej does commend my ability to write code, which I wrote autonomously. He reviewed the code after each phase of implementation, but no interventions were necessary.

Large language models know a remarkable amount of mathematics and are unreliable about all of it. Ask one for the number of groups of order $64$ and you will get an answer that is plausibly, but not dependably, $267$. The remedy is old-fashioned: look things up. We just have to connect the AI with a database of mathematical knowledge through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that lets an AI assistant call external tools.

Bridge MCP is just such an experiment. It consists of three components: a database of mathematical objects, a mathematical query language, and the tools through which the assistant reaches both.

→ continue reading

After spending many irritating hours with ChatGPT and Copilot, I finally tried out Claude. I told it to update photos of mathematicians from a derelict Perl script to a shiny new Python script with JSON, face recognition and modern CSS. It worked like a charm! I am never going back to the other two, sleazy up-sucking generators of mediocrity.

My appetite grew. I asked Claude to spiff up my blog, reinstate comments, and fix old MathML formulas that did not work anymore. Once again, the process was very smooth. For comments it recommended Giscus which requires a GitHub account for posting a comment; I consider this to be an acceptable spam-fighting measure. The comments appearing on the blog are also present at the GitHub Discussions in the blog repository.

I just wanted to say that I am back in business with photos of mathematicians and blog posts!

→ continue reading