Show HN: I built a web tool to see and edit what an AI thinks before it answers

I run a small AI lab and playground and got super excited about Anthropics paper "Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models" (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html)

It talks about how they use a tool they call a Jacobian Lens to view inside the middle layers of LLM while it's working before it commits to a word (token).

I wanted to see if I could get a version of this running on the open models and to my surprise it worked! I ran some experiments with it and build a public facing free tool anyone can use with your own prompts.

Ask the model to describe a symbol of "three curving lines of water" and you can watch "ocean", "sea", and "surf" light up a few layers deeper before it settles on "waves".

You can also edit the internal state. Insert "fire" into the middle layer of the ocean prompt and the answer shifts to something about heat.

For fun / curiosity sake, I also developed way to let the model read its own inner workspace and then decide to suppress or amplify a concept, and run the prompt again.

Interesting finding from running it across models. J-lens beats a plain logit lens on some architectures and does nothing on others, and it isn't about size. A 0.5B Qwen reads better than a 2.8B Pythia. Every Pythia I tried gained basically nothing; the Llama and Qwen models gained a lot. https://lucid.earthpilot.ai/research

This is a 48 hour old project based on emerging research and built on a small model, a small probe set on rented GPUs - but I found it genuinely exciting. The code is open.

I also included a page context "Docent" AI agent you can chat with about whatever you see to help understand what is going on.

Happy to have folks poke around and break it.

I imagine the applications for allowing models to self-reflect / edit internal states can be useful for alignment, confidence, bias detection, etc. and this tool lets you play with the early stages of that.

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48849618

Points: 10

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